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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

This is from a time before CoCs. The part about resolving conflicts with as few resources as possible, as close to the source as possible, seems to be a truism about well functioning (social) systems; really: systems in general.

While we're talking about governance problems. This stuck out to me as evidence of a misunderstanding.

> It holds that reasonable people strike a suitable balance between their own immediate desires and the good of the community at large.

This is just a poor model of how people work; it's important to have a good one if you are designing governance structures. People cater to the greater good only as a means to fulfilling their own selfish desires. Systems that wish this away instead of embracing it are doomed to failure. The system has to put the good of others on the critical path to selfish desires.

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> This is just a poor model of how people work; it's important to have a good one if you are designing governance structures.

This is prescriptive, not descriptive. It's not trying to be a model of how people work.

Nothing about this document tries to claim that being reasonable comes naturally.

Personally, I question the need for CoCs. It seemed they simply started appearing everywhere one day as if following some sort of trend.

People organize together everyday in numerous different professional, community and private settings…with no need for a special set of governing rules for behavior.

The main purpose of a CoC is to point to it when you want to ban someone. It's an accountability sink - instead of saying you want to ban someone, you say you have to ban them because they violated the written rules. The rules, of course, must be written vaguely enough that anyone you might want to ban is violating at least one. It's okay if people you don't want to ban also violate them, because you won't bring it up.

It can also be used as an accountability sink in cases where someone clearly should be banned but you don't have enough courage to say you are banning them because you think they should be. In this case you can also point to the rules. However, if the person who should be banned is sneaky enough, he didn't break any of them. You ban him anyway.

Best use of the term accountability sink I’ve seen out in the wild.

As is the case of most abrupt social changes with no seeming environmental impetus - someone aggressive and powerful found a means of exerting their influence to push their desired social change. And so they did with CoCs.

It may be that someone aggressive who wanted to be powerful found a means of gaining influence through latching onto and pushing a pointless but sellable social change. It's a kind of slow-moving elite on elite violence.

CoCs arose because of endemic abuses that were not organically curbed, sadly.

Not sure one should believe that - everyone with even mild experience of public spaces knows that at the end of the day rules are enforced by people. Doesn't matter if you pour a few liters of woke over the system, it's still the same system.

I'm ready to believe in a conspiracy theory around codes of conduct, actually.

Making unspoken rules public saves everyone time and heartache.

Except perhaps where there are too many contrarians, folks looking for a problem, authors who are being intentionally vague, or acts of malicious compliance.

And yet in real life it looks like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-isl...

A member of the Somalian community instrumentalizing anti-black and anti-Muslim feelings to boost the standing of his own group, and the Code of Conduct fails to protect academic freedom. Well done!

Congrats on finding an exception? Would it have been easier to diagnose if such rules were unwritten?

I still prefer communities that document their rules and expectations over those that don't.

With many people who would be at risk for an enforcement action, odds are they will complain mightily whether the rules are implicit or explicit. It’s not that the rules are codified or not, it’s rules of any kind being applied to them that they find objectionable.

This isn’t universal as some people may be grateful if you approach them tactfully and let them know that others are having difficulty with them, as they may not have realized.

To be frank if someone has driven others away I feel an obligation to to the rest of the group not to shrink from addressing the matter. People whose participation is a net negative because other valued participants flee from them shouldn’t get endless opportunities to make others miserable.

They arose as a way to make it easier to kick people out because you don't feel you have to take accountability for the decision. If the one making the decision is strong (emotionally) they don't need a CoC to kick someone out. Linus can kick the bcachefs developer out of the kernel simply because he wants to. Heck, when he banned all those Russian developers for presumably valid legal reasons, he still wouldn't say the reasons.

The RPP isn’t a governance structure. It’s a statement that the vast majority of activities and interactions shouldn’t require escalating to a governance structure, because people should first be reasonable.

CMU of course has a governance structure (advisors, department heads, honor committees, I don’t even know what all, probably ten times more nowadays than when I was there in the 80s). But the idea is not to need it.

" People cater to the greater good only as a means to fulfilling their own selfish desires."

How does this statement account for inclusive fitness?

This is akin to subsidiarity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

I like how they've written down key tenets of their "unwritten culture", including a quote from someone who refers to it as such.

You don’t think people ever do the right thing just because it’s the right thing?

> ever

That bar is way too low.

I agree with you, the earlier post says people only do things out of self-interest, and I was surprised that nobody else had disagreed or mentioned it’s an unfortunate way to see the world.

I think that mindset is held by most people, most of the time. But not all people at all times. If you're in that mindset, however, the mindset itself may taint your perception of how often others are in the same mindset, which I suspect (hope?) may be the case for the person who wrote the original statement. I suspect (hope?) that person has done at least one selfless ethical/nice/kind thing at some point in their lifetime.

Sounds like something that an unreasonable person would say.

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