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Comment by robbyoconnor | Hacker News Reader

I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. I expected this post to be a rant against codes of conduct and instead it wound up leaving me wondering if NumFOCUS and JupyterCon was in the wrong here...this guy offered criticism and that is NOT a fucking violation of ANY CoC -- if you can't handle criticism, don't make public statements. The hilarious is that Joel Grus didn't care -- like what the hell...this is why sometimes I feel like proponents of CoCs are at times their own worst enemy when it comes to attaining wide support for them.

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I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them.

Why don't you come to to the dark side and oppose codes of conduct then?

I consider the purported goals of codes of conduct to be laudable. But this kind of thing becomes inevitable when SJWs aka political correctness police get power through trying to enforce codes of conduct.

It isn't that sometimes proponents of CoCs are their own worst enemies. It is that there are people seeking power through CoCs who are honestly bad actors. And we shouldn't be putting people we can't trust into a position to control the speech of others.

It, seemingly, isn't inevitable - I can count on one, _maybe_ two hands the number of unfair incidents I've heard since I started hearing people trumpeting the dark side view that 100% absolutely all power is put into service of evil, always.

Most people who are targeted aren't going to go telling the internet about it.

And people who curb their behavior unreasonably out of fear aren't going to advertise that either.

What you hear about is only the tip of the iceberg of what really happens.

I'm taking umbrage with the "But this kind of thing becomes inevitable" part

I initially thought "oh, another guy whining" but this seems to not be the case here but rather a case of a really piss-poor code of conduct.

The author quotes the CoC in his article and none of the points come even close to being a base to judge him on. This instance is about power abuse by a committee that doesn’t even have a basis in the CoC.

Because this isn't a case of a codes of conduct being universally bad, but rather a case of one instance of it being bad. A GOOD code of conduct will be specific and lay out what is acceptable without vagueness.

Most people know what is or isn't acceptable through common sense. A racist or sexual assaulter isn't going to think "Wait, does this violate the code of conduct?"

Every conference doesn't need to go to the trouble of working out some flawless unambiguous list of rules and every attendee doesn't need to read them. If someone is causing a problem eject, ban, or call the police. No CoC needed.

And three sentences of "We don't tolerate abuse, discrimination, or harassment of any speaker or participant at XYZCon. If you have a problem, contact a staff member. If you cause a problem, you may be asked to leave, be banned from future events, and/or the police may be called.

Exactly. In generations past this was called "respecting boundaries" and was something we do as a social activity -- we literally teach others how we are willing to be treated (or more generally, we teach others what behavior will be accepted in that social group).

Despite the increasing anonymity of the world (in that we don't physically live and interact in the same physical space), I think conferences are still small enough social groups that such approaches do work. I've been to some where despite the presence of thousands of people, noteworthy news takes less than a few minutes to travel throughout the conference.

While I agree that a CoC should be no surprise to anyone with common sense, it still makes sense to me to have them:

First, there are people without common sense. Sooner or later someone will not adhere to the unwritten rules and ask "Who's going to stop me?". Even if you can eject/ban them, it will be quite a mess, as you now seem to enforce completely intransparent and artificial rules. People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them. Even if your rules are completely obvious to you and all the people in your peer group, they won't be to everyone.

On the other hand, a CoC signals to potential participants that you take these things seriously. Look at it from the point of view of someone who is used to sexist/racist/otherwise discriminating comments: If you see that a conference has a CoC, that means that they know of your problem and are prepared to combat it. This is more a more inviting conference and it will put you more at ease, because you can feel safer. Without a CoC, people will not attend because they're just tired of this.

So, yes, CoC should be unnecessary because we all know how to behave. Ideally, their content is suprising to no one. But experience shows that not everybody does, or that they in good faith behave in ways that are not acceptable to other people. With a CoC, you make it clear beforehand that "these are the rules", so everyone's on the same page, and you show that you mean it.

> People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them.

Will they? Lots of communities do just fine without spelling them out. If you go over the line, you get a warning by a moderator etc, or, if you've gone way past the line, you get kicked out. You don't need to know where exactly that line is drawn, because reasonable people don't come close to crossing it. And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules.

If you do spell it out, you invite litigation of rules and endless "but you didn't punish that" and in the end you'll have to say "yeah well, I didn't find that offensive", so it's back to "there's a line, but there's also some rules that are meaningless, because in the end the line I draw on the spot is what matters".

Since those kinds of rules will always be vague, and will never be applied evenly, I doubt they are helpful. Maybe there's a small subset of people that would behave perfectly reasonable only if there's a guide book of rules that they can abide by, but I don't think that group is large enough to offset the problems CoCs bring.

> And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules.

I agree with this statement. Having or not having a CoC will not change their behavior, nor should it change your response. But the response to your response can differ: If you've been transparent from the start about your rules, there's less room to complain about you enforcing your rules. If you had no CoC beforehand, there will be some parts of the audience asking if that was really fair. And this behavior doesn't even have to be malicious, just that their line is somewhere else, and so they don't understand your arbitrary enforcement. With clear and transparent rules, they may not agree, but it's clear where the line is. We both think (at least, that's what I gather from your comment) that some rule is necessary, but I'm for being open about it and you want to keep them vague. I think it's easier for everybody to be transparent here, because you can decide beforehand if you agree to these rules. If they're too vague, I'm just hoping that, if push comes to shove, we see the world similarly.

And, again, having a CoC also signals that there is a line. Without it, who's to know that there will be behavior that you don't accept and what it looks like. Maybe you're fine with sexist comments, but not with racism. If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine? I'd rather not visit your conference if you can't make the rules clear.

> If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine?

Don't you do that with a CoC as well? Short of writing a long list of things that may and may not be said, you can only give a vague "please be kind to each other", but the concrete judgement what is and isn't kind depends on whether your views align with those in power.

My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption (where the enforcer's friends are exempt from the rules and the argument is "that wasn't rude, the person deserved to be called a shithead") and the troll's playground, because toxic people that want to cause trouble are great at figuring out the pain points that get to their targets but don't cross any lines.

I believe that enforcement is important, not rules. You can always have a more specific policy for the moderators to guide them and to develop the team's response, but that shouldn't be part of the rules.

It's true that it's not 100% fair that you might get kicked out for breaking a rule you didn't know existed, but to me that's collateral damage I'm more than happy to accept (and I've been on the receiving end of a "you crossed a line" talk).

I'm sorry, I'm not sure, I totally understand your argumentation. You seem to be against vague rules ("My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption [...]"), with which I agree. That's why I want a CoC, so that the rules are open, known and overall transparent.

However, I'm afraid I fail to see why avoiding vague rules means that there should be no CoC at all. Isn't having no written/open rules the vaguest of all? Even if there are rules that only the moderators can see, how is that an improvement for the participants? They can't know what is acceptable, so neither can the accused argue against an unfair response, nor can a potential victim demand enforcement.

And why not have more concrete rules? Surely, they cannot be complete and there will necessarily always be room for intepretation, but I think it is better the more concrete the rules are.

I don't think I've ever seen a community with more than 1 moderator and 0 written rules. At least not for very long.

I used to help moderate a community. Spelling things out only helped us. Fewer incidents. More consistent moderation. Less litigation.

That's true, but it's either vague ("don't be an ass") or it's primarily a thing to have to get the moderators on the same page, not something the community needs, isn't it?

In my opinion, if the rules include value judgements, they're superfluous as rules, because accuser, accused and judge can easily come to vastly different results. If you try to get beyond that and formalize it, you end up with books, and by that time you've transformed your community into a rule-book-writing community.

The community wanted the moderators to get on the same page. They were also tired of discussions turning into arguments like whether insulting things by calling them gay insulted gay people.

We didn't end up with books.

People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them.

Having a CoC doesn't mean that you get this benefit.

In the case in point, the rules being enforced from the CoC were not stated. After being ruled in violation, it was not made clear WHAT rule was violated. And certainly no rule in the actual CoC was violated.

Good codes of conduct can work to set expectations in certain social settings. While it's not illegal to smell bad, a conference may want you to shower before returning to the conference. A clearly stated code of conduct can enforce the professional standards of that conference in order to make all attendees of that conference feel comfortable. The problem here isn't the existence of the code of conduct, it's the combination of the lack of clarity and the hypocritical lack of following its own standards set from the conference organizers.

This is almost certainly not the sort of thing that a different CoC would have made any different absent an absurd IMO rule such as "Do not criticize individuals, projects, companies, etc."

Rather, this is a case of where do you draw the line when something/anything makes someone uncomfortable enough to complain. Do you apply a reasonable person standard and perhaps tell that person "We hear you but we can't agree and we're not going to do anything about it. Sorry."? Or do you say "We understand that we can't tell you how to feel so we accept your complaint and will take action."(And then do so.)?

In practice, for many situations, especially community events tend towards the latter.

Can you provide a concrete example of this “political correctness” you are opposed to?

The OP did.

No, OP really didn’t.

As it is popularly opposed and used it is equivalent to "Newspeak".

For example we had the definition of racism changed. Racism wasn't attributing negative properties to skin color, it has extended to unfalsifiable bias. Also some skin colors are never racist while other always are. Disagreeing means you are racist.

You have a rule against racism in your COC and pretend someone is biased and you conjured an excuse to exclude someone without any sensible rationale.

It is not difficult to understand the objection.

edit: Other examples are behavioral expectations like having to bow before a cross, working in the kitchen, acknowledging your guilt....

Do you think there are negative sub conscious biases around race?

Do you think racism has the same consequences for all races, for example, someone who is a member of a minority group vs someone who is not for a particular region?

Second question:

No. I think I know where the original idea came from. Racism against the majority group is relatively benign compared to that against a minority. It is unlikely that racism can phase them to a relevant degree. But that stops to be the case when you have companies and media personalities starting to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Furthermore I think the most racist people are those that have no problem with being racist at all and those that believe there needs to be some compensatory justice. And this is far more pronounced racism than bias in any form.

first question:

Yes/No. I think there is an initial bias that is quickly overcome on contact because the other one is not you. Same prejudices can exist against unknown people in general. I doubt it is too relevant in exchanges. It can however be the reason for prejudices against people against other that they not ever been in contact with.

I also believe that you need different types of people in a functioning society. For disabled people it might be advantageous to have people ignoring their condition and just pretending that they belong just as everybody else. But you need also people that know that isn't always the case. Everyone wants to make things accessible but if you ask yourself if you always keep that promise the answer is probably 'no'. That is why the latter group is also needed, but there can be conflicts if a differing context isn't cleared up. The first group might have a problem with 'political correctness' in this context.

Dealing with your own subconscious biases is a continuous activity. I grew up in a society with deep structural problems around equality and those sorts of problems seep into every aspect of life. I think it would be arrogant of me to claim I'm somehow immune, that it hasn't influenced the way I think.

I have no problem accepting that I have subconscious biases around things like race and gender, but I work to recognise those biases and I do the best I can to mitigate them.

I don't think it's enough to pass a law and declare the that the war against racism has been won, society has to work clean up the mess and pay off the debt left behind. If that includes compensatory justice, so be it.

First, I would like to recommend http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html as background for what I object to about political correctness.

Political correctness pushes the idea that the whole world should be trying to create a safe space for those who have had any kind of past challenge. There is a time and place for safe spaces. However the act of encouraging people to figure out what problems they can complain about, then coddling them, makes people more fragile. This has long-lasting negative implications for their mental health.

For example https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-mentally-strong... explains what has actually been observed in children whose parents tended too closely to their perceived needs. Similarly therapists have found that encouraging people with PTSD to avoid any reminder of their past trauma actually makes the trauma worse. Instead it is more effective to desensitize them with controlled exposure to the trauma to teach them to be able to handle it.

This gives us some idea of how to create mental health. What are we doing instead? Well, we are teaching a whole generation that the world needs to take care of them due to a variety of past misdeeds. In the process we teach them to be sensitive to things that otherwise would not have bothered them very much. We then encourage them to demand that they not encounter reminders of what they don't like, and try to make the whole world a "safe space" for them. This is a recipe for systemically creating PTSD among people who otherwise would not develop it. Thereby creating the exact condition that we are trying to help. And, having created it, we have motivation to do more of the same so that more people become fragile.

I know, I know. This isn't a popular point of view. It suggests that a large portion of the SJW agenda is backwards. However I believe, and there is evidence from psychology to back me up, that it is right. We should not go overboard to protect people from encountering speech and ideas that they don't like. We should instead make people resilient to that experience. Both for their mental health, and so that they learn critical thinking.

In my country, "Political Correctness" is a dog whistle used by Daily Mail readers. It doesn't mean anything. I don't shape my thinking by what some talking head thinks.

Why do you think I asked for a concrete example? I notice that you didn't provide one either.

Concrete examples of political correctness gone bad.

Censoring the OP for calling someone else wrong. (When the person called wrong is actually a friend and didn't object.)

Cisco firing employees for saying, "All lives matter."

Maya Forstater being fired for expressing the opinion that while she used people's preferred pronouns, she thought of trans people as their original gender if they still had their real genitalia.

Emmanuel Cafferty (a Mexican American) being fired for an alleged white supremacist hand gesture that he had never even HEARD of as a white supremacist hand gesture. (Also did I mention that he's not even white?)

Ongoing persecution of academics who dare research trans issues from any perspective that trans activists do not approve of. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-ar... for more on that.

Is that enough examples for you?

I’m trans and you are twisting quite a few of those, but you don’t exist from this point on as far as I’m concerned. I won’t debate my my right to be with anyone, least of all you.

Wonderful. You don't believe that people have the right to have opinions that you dislike. And don't see that as a problem.

Possibly because you expect people whose opinions you dislike to treat you like you would treat them if positions were reversed.

I don't mind being dead to you. But I don't want you, or people like you, to be in a position to make decisions about what I can say. Nor do I particularly want to be in a position to decide what you can say. What I want is called "freedom of speech".

As the old saying goes, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."

However when you open up the door to stopping other people from speaking, you have opened up the door to them stopping you from speaking. Are you sure that all of your opinions agree with that majority? Really? You think nothing that others might find controversial? If so, that's weird. And good luck if you ever change your mind about anything important.

The Maya Forstater case isn't as you presented it. Why did you misrepresent it? Was it an innocent mistake or was it deliberate? She got sacked for a sustained campaign of harassment.

If you don't believe me (and it would therefore be an innocent mistake), you can read the court ruling here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12P9zf82TicPs2cCxlTnm0TrNFDD...

If you've misrepresented this one, why would I trust any of your other examples?

I was doing a quick search and believed someone else's representation of the case. But let's look at the case.

A woman in question has a reasonably common belief that offends you and I think is not in accord with the facts. She is open about her belief, but also has apparently made an attempt to be polite in personal interactions with others. (See paragraph 41 for example.)

Despite the ruling coming down against her, I read this and think that she has a right to have and express that opinion. That when we suppress the expression of opinions like this, they don't go away. Instead they become stronger.

Some of her opinions I agree with, and some not.

Here is an example where I disagree. I don't think that female only spaces should exclude transwomen. I also don't think that my opinion on that should matter because such spaces should exclude me. However based on the fact that most women do not agree with her, they such spaces will include them. Hooray. She is free to make her own space that excludes though, and anyone who wants can join her. That's called free association.

Here is an example where I agree with her. People born male have a significant biological advantage in many sports. This is historically the reason why we separated men and women for sports such as tennis and running. As a result, trans and intersex women have a significant advantage in the same sports. See Caster Semenya for a famous example. I do not think it is at all unreasonable to ban people who retain that advantage from participating as women in such sports.

Now let's compare her belief to one that is more obviously protected.

I'm an atheist and believe in science. I have worked with fundamentalist Christians who honestly believe that the world is 6000 years old, and that I'm going to Hell. And have told me such in as many words. As you can guess, I didn't enjoy it. But we were able to maintain cordial relations in the workplace, and I wouldn't ask them to be fired for expressing an opinion that they honestly held. Despite my opinions about their opinion.

As I said, I'm for free speech. Whether or not people agree with me, or I with them.

They clearly weren’t sacked for their opinions, but for creating a hostile work environment.

The free speech argument is a cop out frankly, and a lazy one at that.

Your argument as stated also applies to e.g. unions, police, workers' councils or any other place where individuals are elected to "protect" the group. And it is undeniable that these have overall improved the situations of these groups. The argument is flawed in that it does not consider the upsides of instituting them.

This does not mean that CoCs are unequivocally the best solution. But fully ignoring their benefits due to the potential for abuse is not inherently sound.

It can apply to those situations, but the fact that in those cases the people most likely to be affected have a voice in who gets chosen is an incentive to good behavior that is missing in this case.

If you're running a conference, you APPOINT who will be deciding whether the CoC has been violated. If you appoint people who are not trusted by activists, you will face criticism from said activists. If you appoint people who are trusted by activists, you've appointed people who likely got ahead by getting activists fired up in the past. What they did in the past they will do in the future, and you've just given them the platform on which they will do it.

That's a catch-22 for the organizer, and a set of perverse incentives that makes it easy for the people I don't want to see in that position to get in that position.

> The hilarious is that Joel Grus didn't care

It's probably not the case here, but imo it's a feature of CoCs that they protect people who can't publicly object themselves for whatever reason.

Like, for an extreme example, if I know I'm gonna get harassed if I make noise about someone's genuinely harmful behavior, then it's good that I can publicly be like "oh no it's fine don't worry" and there's still a process to stop them from harming more people.

Except it wasn't harassment -- guess what? People can say you're wrong. Check your ego at the door if you give a public talk. They shouldn't say "he's a fucking idiot" but saying "I feel that got X,Y, and Z wrong and here's why:" is not a fucking CoC violation. I support codes of conduct and always will but this is where things went topsy-turvy, do not try to roll your own and try to be specific.

I'm not saying it was harassment, I'm using an extreme example to make the point that "the supposedly aggrieved party says it was fine" shouldn't by itself be considered sufficient evidence that the CoC wasn't broken and that action shouldn't be taken.

Fair point.

> People can say you're wrong. Check your ego at the door if you give a public talk.

There are probably tons of lectures on how to disagree with someone while phrasing it neutrally. For example "you are wrong" vs. "I disagree with your point" . I couldn't imagine using such a style constantly without slipping up every now and then but it is probably double plus good in an environment that forces you to walk on eggshells.

Most modern legal systems give people the right to confront their accusers for good reason: Giving people the power to accuse others without any possibility of consequences will ultimately be abused.

I understand the desire to protect specifically vulnerable accusers in unique situations, but we should be catering to those situations on a case-by-case basis.

In this case, isolating the accusers from the accused didn’t help anyone. The accusers weren’t even the direct victims of this imagined offense. They were simply using the CoC machinery to bring something negative upon someone else while knowing they would never suffer any negatives for what they did.

We don't know anything about the accusers, do we? I don't think it's fair to assume they had malicious intentions.

Specifically, I don't think we can assume that the people who were uncomfortable with the talk were like "this speaker should be banned from the conference". Maybe the initial message was closer to "hey, this seems a bit harsh and distracts from the actual content, maybe the speaker wouldn't mind toning it down for the next talk".

Yeesh. Malice would be more respectable.

> We don't know anything about the accusers, do we?

That’s the problem. The system is broken because it’s designed to give the accusers every benefit of the doubt, while giving the accused no recourse.

The accused is at the mercy of anonymous complaints. The accusers have zero accountability or downsides.

I'd say the accused is at the mercy of the conf organizers evaluating the complaints fairly. But the accused is at the mercy of the conf organizers whether they use a CoC or not.

Where did you see he didn't care?

https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/1321627567737069568?s=19 he said their decision was fucked up.

The phrase didn't care in this context means that he was OK with his opinion being called wrong, not that he literally doesn't care either way.

Precisely what was said above is what I meant.

>> I support the thoughtful enforcement of Code of Conducts to address blah blah blah, but ...

>I support codes of conduct but ...

CoCs are crap and you both know it

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