The Hugging Will Continue Until Morale Improves | Hacker News Reader

The Hugging Will Continue Until Morale Improves

blog.codinghorror.com

11 pointsDrJokepu6 comments

tl;dr; You should adopt a code of conduct as safety theater and you should lie (by omission, at least) about the fact that they are useless. It's a cheap and convenient way to manipulate women into feeling safe regardless of whether they are or are not.

Obviously my mood affiliation differs from Atwood, but can anyone tell me if I'm missing any important point in his article?

And if I'm not mistaken, this argument seems to apply equally well to banning Telegram, pornoscanning people getting on airplanes, and similar things. After all, we want people to feel safer from terrorism, even if they aren't, right?

About the fact that they are useless?

If you're on HN, you've problably seen a lot of open source software and met people who write that, and you may agree with this assessment: 99% of it is written by people who would rather extract a wisdom tooth than file a lawsuit.

Yet there's very little violation of the license terms going on. Some, not much.

IMO Jeff Atwood is right when he says that programmers excel at rules. Make rules for something, anything, and progammers will largely follow them, and will quarrel about the rules and any violation when given the slightest chance.

99% of code is written by people who won't file a lawsuit, most companies don't want to deal with the 1% chance of getting sued. In any case, Atwood's argument isn't that the code of conduct will change behavior.

He pretty explicitly says women are like children, and you should just emotionally manipulate them rather than solving their problems:

Even if you do believe these things [that a code of conduct doesn't improve safety], why would you say them out loud?

...runs counter to everything I know about empathy...a feeling of safety is, in fact, what many people are looking for.

The quickest way to turn a child's frustration into a screaming, explosive tantrum is to try to fix their problem for them. This is such a hard thing for engineers to wrap their heads around, particularly male engineers, because we are all about fixing the problems.

It's pretty amazing to see someone with mainstream mood affiliation so openly admitting this.

No, the author says he will probably not have a code of conduct. And, in my opinion, he is pointing out the very important divergence between how professional organizers of events think and act and what attendees think how this should be done. He is explicitly saying that feeling safer does not make you safer: "We want people to be safe, not just feel safe. We bake safety into the event. We need to be deliberate. We must design safe events."

The author explicitly says he will use a code of conduct, and you should too.

To show that I absolutely do believe in the value of a code of conduct...I'm also adding a code of conduct...to the Discourse project.

If you maintain an open source project, I strongly urge you to consider formally adopting a code of conduct, too.

He acknowledges feeling safer doesn't make you safer, but says you should make people irrationally feel safe anyway.

The words in your quotes do not appear in the article - did you get them from another post of his?

Indeed, it was from an article linked from the one. My bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com