[Arm-netbook] Code of conduct?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

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crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68


On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 12:34 PM, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)
<pelzflorian at pelzflorian.de> wrote:
> On 09/17/2016 11:52 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 10:06 AM, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)
>> <pelzflorian at pelzflorian.de> wrote:
>>> It directly references skin color, religion etc. and
>>> the term SJW clearly is about these -isms. Sexism etc. are selective
>>> harm. The bill of rights is against harm.
>>
>>  not quite: it's specifically against "reductions of truth,
>> creativity, love and awareness" (those all being synonyms for the same
>> underlying concept).  that's *not* quite the same thing as "harm".
>>
>>  to illustrate the difference clearly: if you tell someone the truth
>> when they don't want to hear it, do they get really upset?  can that
>> be called "harm"? (it can).  thus, telling someone the truth may
>> actually cause them "harm"!
>>
>
> Well, yes. I oversimplified.

 words being what they are, it's a critical, critical difference which
indicates a fundamental and key difference between this document and
any others that anyone (including myself) is ever likely to have
encountered.  up until two months ago i *genuinely* thought that the
"Bill of Rights" was a really good document.  then i heard of the
"Bill of Ethics" and realised - only by comparison - that anything
labelled "Rights" is downright dangerous.

>>> My point is, it seems to me the first esr link does not address the real
>>> arguments made by “SJWs” but strawmen, perhaps deliberately, perhaps
>>> not.
>>
>>  you can see hints that his (esr's) mind knows that something's wrong
>> with SJWs, and that he's trying to make sense of it.
>>
>
> It is quite possible that esr’s comment was an honest comment meant to
> be constructive instead of a deliberate misunderstanding. However, esr’s
> arguments may be an appropriate response to a call for affirmative
> action / positive discrimination, but no such call was made by the
> “Social Justice Warriors”.
>
>> anyway, my point is: i see absolutely no need for a "code of conduct",
>> *especially* not one that even *identifies* -isms as being something
>> that's necessary to acknowledge or even remotely consider as part of
>> achieving the goal of ensuring the success of the EOMA initiative.  if
>> the EOMA initiative *itself* were *defined* as being "the promotion of
>> -isms" then and *only* then would "-isms" be absolutely critical.
>>
>> however, as it is not, my feeling is that to remain *entirely -ism
>> neutral* and i do mean utterly -ism independent, it is much better to
>> not even *acknowledge the existence* of -isms than it is to try and
>> become bogged down in defining them.  in quantum mechanics tunneling
>> terms, if the particle "looks backwards" it cannot escape the quantum
>> well.  only if it ignores the impossibly-high cliff wall entirely can
>> it escape the trap.
>>
>>
>
> When there are many administrators/moderators/employees/… who can make
> decisions, having a clear policy protects decision makers from
> accusations of not being impartial and makes it easier to complain about
> bad decisions.

 there's a prior step here which is critically important to have even
before adding in "complaints procedures".  adding in any kind of "code
of conduct" on top of something that is fundamentally broken (or
hasn't been made clear) is asking for trouble.

 so *even before* getting into that sort of thing, a clear
communications and decision-making policy has to be put in place.
honestly, if someone with 30 years of research into this field says
that they found unanimous small groups between 7 and 9 in side of
50-50 men and women was *the* most effective way to get decisions
made, i'm inclined to trust that over and above anything else.

 and i can also see that the Bill of Ethics is sufficiently
"low-level" that a "code of conduct" is not even necessary.



> Yes, defining -isms is hard, therefore the best practice appears to be
> to adopt a code of conduct written and tested by others with more
> experience, see [2].

 no. fundamentally disagree.  finding a communications and
decision-making process that is good enough such that it *doesn't
need* a code of conduct (because it's a completely -ism-agnostic part
*of* the process) is i feel more important than trying to band-aid
broken decision-making processes.

l.