Comment by lsiebert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsiebert | Hacker News Reader

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I'm reading a lot of comments here saying that CoCs are categorically bad. Which absolutely isn't what Jeremy is saying in this post, in fact he says just the opposite.

CoCs help prevent and deal with incidents of racism, sexism, homophobia, threats of violence, etc. Those aren't things I, and presumably you, don't want at conferences.

This was an example of CoC being poorly implemented in several ways; that does not mean that CoCs are inherently bad, anymore than corruption in some country's election should be taken to mean that democracy is bad.

There will never be a perfect CoC or CoC process, but there are definitely better and worse ones, and better and worse usages. Personally I'd rather go, or have colleagues go, to conferences which have one; if this conference didn't have a CoC then the critiques Jeremy offered couldn't have been as specific and pointed.

I've seen events and organizations ruled entirely by the organizer's arbitrary fiat and trust me, some of those have been horrible, much worse than they might have been had they had an organized standardized Code of Conduct.

Code of conducts are untested unlike democratic processes.

They are too new and too different. Some can be written benign and others not. They are tools.

Most political structures have rules in them which work regardless of who weilds them, codes of conduct don't. Codes of conduct assume they will be used by good people (and most of them are!) real law or poltical processes assume they might be used by bad people.

There's a real good reason why we think in law that the accused should be treated as if they are innocent. Most codes assume the accused is guilty.

"Most political structures have rules in them which work regardless of who weilds them"

Can you give an example of a rule that "works" regardless of who wields it?

>I'm reading a lot of comments here saying that CoCs are categorically bad. Which absolutely isn't what Jeremy is saying in this post, in fact he says just the opposite.

Him talking about supports a code of conduct was like listening to a shooting victim talking about how they support gun rights. It's like walking into his hospital room, him sitting up, and instantly going into a monologue about how the 2nd amendment protects us from tyranny. It reminds one of the the "Leopards eating faces" meme. If this post sold a code of conduct as a way to fight back against trumped up charges by being able to compare your behavior to stated rules, and expose arbitrariness, I think he might have actually made code of conducts sound like a great thing. Yet instead be defended CoC's by questioning the character of their critics with the line

>the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”).

That's just such a bizarre and weird response given he did literally get cancelled regardless of if he likes it or not and is making a post arguing he's not just "facing consequences". He's like the person in the welfare lineup who thinks everybody around him is a lazy bum.

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