Boundaries are imho critical to give structure to society. The advances in technology and more so the pervasiveness and persistence of communication is eroding the previous boundaries between groups, places and time.
Past transgressions now have an impact today often way beyond the statues of limitation. In most of these discussions the reason these statues exist are ignored. Discussions in one place affect another place. Behavior that is questionable in a classroom becomes national news. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software.
When boundaries are torn down cultures clash. Some of it may be healthy. But without boundaries would there be culture?
> Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software.
Okay. Under my real name/identity, I was once upon a time a substantial contributor to the Drupal project, a PHP-based CMS/web dev framework.
Earlier this year, we had a kerfluffle where someone had a grudge against Larry "Crell" Garfield, a core developer, liaison to the wider PHP community, and just general pillar of the Drupal community for over a decade. This person shared activity that Crell had done in the "Gor" (kinda BSDM plus fantasy cosplay) community, which, IIRC, included private forum posts, a dating site profile, and a slideshow deck he had presented from a convention. All of this stuff was from private web sites; eg, ones where you'd have to at least sign up for an account to get access to.
The person with the grudge, who, as far as I know, has yet to be identified, provided this material to the Drupal Association as evidence that Crell, a typical SV leftist in most respects, was actually a closeted unrepentant misogynist who needed to be kicked out of the community. Battle lines were drawn, with some agreeing that he was trash while others felt that his out-of-community behavior had no effect on all the hard work he had done and could still do within it. And bickering happened instead of collaboration and coding.
Ultimately the Association came down on the side of the agitators and disinvited Crell from his speaking position at the next Drupalcon, where he had always been prevalent. Expectedly, he became quite bitter about this and has somewhat voluntarily withdrawn further from the community.
So now a talented developer and decade-plus community member has been effectively kicked out of the community for personal, private kinks he, by all accounts, took great care to keep private and separate from this community.
Due to this and other reasons, I now use pseudonyms when joining new communities, and now some of my best OSS work is being done under a pseudonym I have taken care to keep air-gapped from my real identity - not great for my career, but I know that I, as a human, have quirks and kinks as well that others would just love to judge me by, and it's apparently what we have to do nowadays in order to be judged by our work rather than our pasts and out-of-community activity. And, frankly, I'm so disgusted by what happened to Crell that I too have disengaged from the community and no longer use Drupal as my framework of choice (though there are other reasons as well for the latter).
So, no. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature only affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software if you make it so.
> Boundaries are imho critical to give structure to society.
Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral position to a favored class, whether an economic class, intellectuals, a military class, or priesthood, was always where these boundaries were. The thing you can't see is that your/our "boundaries" are no different.
And every single time, those boundaries turned out to be, not "for trade" (e.g. the Roman Empire), "for the military" (e.g. the second Islamic dynasty), intellectuals (e.g. the French revolution - the first part, or Communism in Eastern Europe) or "for morality" (e.g. the West in the middle ages). I mean, I'm sure there was a period of, say, a decade, where they actually did what it said on the label. It never lasted.
Every single time, those "boundaries" served to guarantee the comfort of a favored class. Firstly, to safeguard their positions of power and comfort, their fortunes, but later even their ideas and egos.
The real boundary we are wanting to impose is that "we are right".
And it's real, real simple. There is a tiny little issue:
We
Are
Wrong
Boundaries do impose structure. The structure does not change, and the world does. That's fundamentally why the boundaries are wrong and the structure will not hold.
I do not know how or where exactly we are wrong, but we are wrong (although I have some ideas: any 5 year old, old enough to talk intelligently, but not old enough to be assimilated yet, will tell you when you walk with them through any city what we are terribly wrong about. There's plenty, I might add).
And that sucks. If it turns out that we are most catastrophically wrong about a moral issue, it will suck REAL bad. And that's happened before. Plenty of times.
It is funny how you see the bay area aging. When we started out, most were in our late teens, early twenties at best. And of course we all felt the same: society is VERY wrong. In all sorts of ways. For instance, women are not different, and certainly not inferior. We KNEW that 20 years ago. But now we're 40, and we feel that, dammit, we're right. And these kids, who seem to prefer economic gains over social issues. Lazy bastards !
And, like the rich 30 years ago, we've decided (whilst having pretty much every creature comfort we like) that moral issues (that just happen to keep our place in society safe and secure) are real important. And these upstart youngsters (who do not in fact enjoy many of our creature comforts), they're bad, mmmkay ! Dammit ! They MUST be stopped.
They will, of course, defeat us. Nothing can stop them.
And they will clobber more than some of our ideas.
And, they will abandon some of our morals.
The thing is, this is a good and healthy thing to happen.
This is a question worth discussing. But I'm not sure I like the implicit assumption that a "community" is a discrete entity entirely divorced from all other such entities. If you're contemplating a person's activities outside a particular social group, you aren't asking "does this affect my social group?", but rather "what impact does this have on society at large?" I can't see that it's controversial to suggest that someone may act in one context in a way that should have consequences for their activities in another context - we quite happily accept, for instance, that a violent drunk ought not to be permitted to teach children, even if they have never been drunkenly violent towards children. I don't see that a software development project should be any different from any other subset of human society in this respect.
Software development projects are somewhat different in that they frequently include a large number of people from very disparate cultural backgrounds and little in-person social contact. The lack of the sort of social cohesion that we see in more traditional social groups is part of the reason that open source projects are increasingly adopting explicit behavioural guidelines, but the risk there becomes that those guidelines are considered the totality of what should be taken into account when determining whether someone does more harm than good within a community. Coming up with a more formalised set of considerations for external behaviour would help there.
I think having online anonymity and a reasonable ability to create pseudonyms to keep your communities separate is important and often overlooked. I think it’s not OK for one community to be the moral authority over aspects of ones life, most especially a community in which you are volunteering and contributing in good standing.
As with a lot of things, I believe in a balance. I agree that anonymity in a lot of areas are crucial; oppressive regimes, whistle-blowing, private/sexual preferences, whatever have you.
But as we've seen in the last year, complete anonymity and untraceability everywhere can have bad consequences; astro-turfing, smurfing, attention-ddos:ing, FUD, anti-net neutrality-comment identity theft.
In some of these cases a central e-ID (which a lot of nations have) could have mitigated those issues, in others, not so.
Ideas should live on their own merit, in which case the identity of the source is irrelevant, but (pardon my French) idiots make the case that logic and merit of ideas don't take center stage. In those cases I believe it's kind of relevant to know if you're buying into group think that is 80% bots, 5% trolls, 5% adversarial agents, etc.
Anonymity is one solution to the problem of being able to keep dissenting opinions, but a solution with severe side effects. Transparency with a strong protection of freedom of ideas is another route.
I guess to put it succinctly: I don't need to know the names or faces of the people I carry conversations with, only that they're real, unique people. It shouldn't matter, but recent history shows otherwise.
A growing challenge that communities face is where an activist minority act against a member based on an agenda that is not representative of the larger community yet influences as if it were.
Problem with these sorts of discussions is that they torture the meaning of the word “community.” Most of these aren’t.
Rephrase as: when should your public reputation among one set of people affect your public reputation among another set of people? When should that latter effect result in consequences?
And then the answer is obvious: whenever the latter set of people find your public behavior to be unwelcome, regardless of which context you chose to unveil it in.
I see your point but you didn't really tackle the problem at hand.
To detach the situation from current feelings, let's take a time trip back to hypothetical year ~1975.
Let's say it's illegal to register a NGO, company or anything that has a rule of "no sexual group X allowed". Now let's say that there is some guy who is absolutely brilliant at playing the violin, but has at some point allegedly done some homosexual approach to straight guy. Which any gay would have just brushed away, but now it was taken as harassment.
We have obviously created a situation where it's impossible for that violinist to take part in any orchestra. No "only gays & women orchesta" is allowed by law. Society completely wastes that human resource. Some male musicians somewhere possibly have slightly better work security. But the cost is that millions of people never hear the recordings of that great violinist.
You have to pick:
A. Allow organizations to be completely self selecting. This would have a set of short term problems and it's currently not kosher at all.
B. Allow alleged transgressors to somehow wipe their record clear. Seems practically impossible during internet age and click headlines.
C. Force people to be cool about people who have allegedly transgressed in some way in some other social setting. But now you lose productivity of whole teams, not just some individuals here and there.
D. Lose a lot of human resources. And probably for petty reasons. If allegation is enough, you can destroy too competitors easily. As shown by the red scare, Stalins purges, etc.
This was originally a case about a programmer allegedly groping some women. Seems like if you could start a company of "former sexual harassers inc", you could soon hire lots of splendid talent dirt cheap. Then you just need to somehow hide the origin of the products being made to the consumers. But soon even that won't matter much if there is anything to be learned from the music industry.
It used to be that you interacted almost exclusively face-to-face, within a small community. One of the better consequences was a sort of instant feedback loop, where your actions that hurt others were quickly reflected back onto you: abandoned your ailing grandmother? The local grocer will stop giving you credit.
These were social feedback mechanisms. They have the benefit of being much more subtle than the criminal justice system, and kicking in much earlier.
It’s ridiculous how some in the tech community pretend these mechanisms don’t exist, or that they should not exist: every time you have decided who to invite to your birthday party, or who to sit with at lunch, you have taken such considerations into account.
People are social animals. They use social cues to reward beneficial actions, and punish even slight misdeeds. This is necessary to establish standards of behavior, or basic human decency.
There should be limits to this process, the most important of which is time. No one should be forced to reveal to his neighbors that he is a “sex offender”, ten years after drunkenly taking a piss in a public park. Nor should your teenage shenanigans be the top hit in google for eternity.
But standing a front of a synagogue on a Saturday, with a torch, a gun, a swastika flag? Yeah, you better believe your friends and coworkers will look funny at you come Monday.
Behavior outside a community should have consequences inside it when it has consequences inside it.
If your behavior outside of a community causes an uproar and crisis inside the community when it becomes known, it has already had a consequence inside the community. It will already have future ramifications. All you can do at that point is decide whether you want the future ramifications to include a commendation, condemnation or silence from the community.
Communities are not hermetically sealed environments. In my opinion it is silly and childish to pretend they are.
When "it becomes known" is a matter of one person going on a moral crusade to destroy the other person's reputation and position because of something about them, wholly unrelated to the project, which they personally dislike--is it still valid for there to be "consequences" within the community?
If so, it seems like only a matter of time for all of us, because surely all of us do things or hold opinions that someone else in a community we participate in would find unacceptable. Therefore, all that is required for anyone to destroy anyone else is to "cause an uproar and crisis" about them.
What will you say when someone causes an uproar and crisis about you?
This is one of the issues with this debate. As you mentioned if your behavior has caused an uproar/crisis, then it already has and will have consequences. People might quit, they might get angry and so forth.
When people seem to talk about consequence in this manner they seem to mean that 'People should stop caring about what other people have said or done', even if it means ignoring things like how a person believes you are literally a lesser human being due to some trait you were born with. 'Diversity of Thought' as a statement has been latched onto as being an excuse rather than its original purpose.
I'm going to upvote this, even though it's another in a long line of "I don't understand classical liberalism or the roots of our modern secular society" posts by various authors, both famous and not.
At the heart of a lot of this is the simple question: is our larger world supposed to be one big social group? Some folks think yes. For those folks, if you have a small community, it's a legitimate question as to how much "control" you should have on members when they are outside that community.
To me this is an answered question and the answer is no, small groups and large groups of people are completely different things. Trying to shoe-horn experiences and ideas about one group into the other group leads to nothing but heartache and disappointment.
But since so many folks are struggling so much, it's a conversation that needs to continue for a while. Hopefully it will lead somewhere positive.
ADD: I will, however, admit to having much frustration watching my tech friends struggle so much with concepts that should have been part of their early education. Speaking humorously, I reserve the right to buy an inflatable copy of "On Liberty" and start beating a few of them about the head with it if things don't change.
AFAICT, the guy went a little too far out of his way to say that lots of rape accusations are fake? But the guy still has job and status, right? Just some social ostracism?
Behavior outside a community should very little consequences inside of it. Of course there are some extreme cases where this might be a problem however those cases are extremely rare and should not generally be used for the basis of creating a Code of conduct or rule set
The wider political climate in world today is making have to be that simple.
While the article talks about more extreme cases like actual physical sexual assault, today far far far too many communities are using simple political disagreement and criticism and framing that as "harassment" using that "harassment" as method to remove any political dissenters from their ranks
I have seen it attempted (some times with great success) in several open source projects.
Personally I dislike the very concept of Codes of Conduct and I generally oppose most of the terms in many of the more modern Code of Conduct being pushed forward, likely as a result of my very libertarian political views. That said Codes of Conducts (should a community or project adopt them) should only be enforced based on actions WITH IN that community and/or toward people that are IN THAT community.
Not generalized actions of people taken in other communities with a different set of conventions and rules.
Code of Conduct should be seen as a contract of Behavior that all people agree to when voluntary associating with the community to treat all other MEMBERS of that community based on that code of conduct, it should not apply to conduct when interacting with people not a part of that community and thus never agreed to the code of conduct.
I completely agree, the code of conduct has been used multiple times as a trojan horse in the sense that it only contains things nobody could reasonably disagree with (because who would not want a welcoming environment), only to then be used to shun /outcast people based on views particularly on gender and diversity. This is one of the issues Sam Altman referred to in his blog that simply cannot be talked about in Silicon Valley currently.
I think this article doesn't take a broad enough view of the question. As stated, it's a very large (and non-trivial) question.
For example, as stated, the question includes questions like: - Should America care if somebody is convicted of a crime by a foreign nation?
- Should a school care if a candidate to be a teacher was discovered viewing child pornography?
- Should a job care if/why you got fired from your last job?
- Should you care why your ex's last relationship failed?
The answer to all of these is obviously "depends on the specifics." It's tempting to draw hard boundaries so as to prevent people from weaponizing politics. Unfortunately, I just don't think hard-boundaries are coherent here.
There's a difference between behavior and speech, though it can become a fuzzy line (is a large donation behavior or speech?).
One thing some of the comments have touched on is the notion of "beyond the pale" - a term that somewhat ironically (for this discussion) refers to occurrences outside the bounds of British law. There are opinions that fall outside the standards of decency, and this can, legitimately, make organizations reluctant to work with some people.
Many issue positions, over time, can go from widely accepted, to controversial, to widely discredited, to beyond the pale, essentially and uncontroversially indecent. If this is the case, it's almost certain that we're going through this process right now. Unfortunately, there is also a strong political tendency to scold and smear and be as uncharitable as possible to the other side. In aggregate, people get accused of being on the "wrong side of history" at least twice as often as they actually are, since these accusations go in both directions on virtually every controversial topic.
The answer is clearly "never" --- the attitude expressed in the article leads toward totalitarian control over people's personal lives. Toleration, as Europe took hundreds of years to painfully discover, is the way you build a cohesive society around people who disagree. When you ban cooperation among people with divergent political opinions, you not only lose out on any positive-sum productivity gains from the interaction, but also intensify these political differences and turn them into real rifts in society.
I am disappointed in the contemporary trend to invest imaginary "harms" and propose remedies that, in the end, boil down to persecuting people for their beliefs. Altman is definitely right about the social atmosphere in tech. Imagining that we should, say, ban contributions to an open source project from someone who also participates in 4chan is part of the problem.
I still think the answer here is 'never', communities should be as self contained as possible and not try and take over personal lives. To do otherwise reminds of those schools that try and punish students (and sometimes teachers) for actions done in their free time; an absolutely ridiculous overreach that makes things worse rather than better.
And I stick by that for communities I run. On every site I'm an admin/founder, the rule is that (legal issues excepting), we won't punish you for things done outside of the community. It's not our place to do so, and we have no interest in witch hunting or trying to find reasons to deplatform people for things they do in their free time elsewhere.
Well, when the inner community relies heavily on trust, such as a company where you handle peoples' money, or even teach them about money, I think integrity is such a highly valued quality, that you would be extremely sensitive to any sign that an individual lacks it ( ie acting differently in different situations, or cheating on their spouse, for example ). "If a spouse can't trust a person, why should I trust them as their boss?" -Dave Ramsey
This whole question really stems from a sad and pervasive tendency for 'intelligent' people to overestimate their general expertise, and then apply their value judgements to individuals in their social circle, regardless of its utility or relevance.
Examples of this:
Alan Turing -- father of Computer Science shunned, at the time, because everyone had value judgements regarding his homosexuality (completely irrelevant to Computer Science).
The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This, of course, continues further, with things such as Hollywood blacklisting (today) Conservatives, and formerly Communists.
The solution is simple:
Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
If I am deeply opposed to gay marriage, but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
If I strongly believe in UFO visitations, and disbelieve climate change, but am a great graphic designer, that should not affect my reputation as an artist.
Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.
This inability to separate emotions and passions from cooperating on a shared focus with others, of differing emotions and passions, but equal interest in the shared focus (community) is deeply damaging.
There are enough problems and difficulties getting skilled people together to work on something great -- there is no use at all in reducing that crowd of people further by limiting it to those who share ones views in any number of hot button issues.
Leave politics to your political circles, make your own impressions of people before making personal judgements from reputation, find every reason to work together, not any excuse not to.
The Brendan Eich situation is really interesting. I've personally cited it as a gross overreach into his personal life. But it has been really fruitful to play out scenarios with it and explore my own ethics system, perhaps exposing some gaps.
I personally tend to break conservatively in my views, but I would be equally outraged if a liberal were fired for supporting, say, communist revolution. I certainly understand why people who hold certain views would want that person fired, but I have no problem separating that from their work. I wouldn't want them running my country, but Mozilla is fine.
I ultimately arrived at the outcome that in order to be consistent, I don't think it's OK for any _position_ someone takes to be considered for work performance. Actions, sure, but a position must have absolute freedom. So, if my CEO were to consider people who vote for republicans subhuman (not an entirely unlikely scenario today), but otherwise conducted themselves fairly, I'd be OK with it.
So, did Eich take a position, or an action? Are you really allowed to have a position if you aren't allowed to support it?
I'll say action, despite my bias urging me to say position. Was this action taken to support his desire to preserve something, or to deny someone else of something? If you're one of the people impacted by this action, does it matter?
These questions make it easy to see the tough position Mozilla was in. I'm not sure what conclusion I'd have reached in their shoes, despite my from-the-hip decision that he did nothing wrong.
> The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
He was fired as CEO, not as CTO or any other technical position. The CEO is meant to represent the organisation. Denying rights to individuals goes against Mozilla's ethos and detracts from its campaign goals. Put simply, if the CEO isn't supported by their org then they are an ineffective CEO.
I think an issue is that by including some people you are by necessity working to make other groups unwelcome: the choice to be apolitical is a political choice.
Do executives get to have private views? It’s unfortunate, but the media seems to love using personal actions by executives as representative of the company they work for. So in Eich’s case I think Mozilla had a legitimate concern that his personal views would be perceived as the company’s stance.
The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
Probably quite relevant to his position as CEO of an organisation that employs (and would like to hire) LGBT people.
> Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
I would add that for contributions outside of the community, they should be judged if they relate to that community.
For instance, if a a security expert, goes out to conferences telling people to use MFA, but privately tells people not to use it because it is "too complicated" that person would rightly be judged by the community. (Note: I mean they regularly make that reccomendation privately, not a one-off because they don't want to tell their grandparent to use MFA).
> The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This is complicated for roles like CEO, they don't have a specific _technical_ role. Their role is the define the vision and direction of the company. I believe that part of the CEO job to define the values and mores for the organization, if this is wrong, let me know as that is kind of fundamental to my point.
In that case, wouldn't it be right that that a CEO is fired for their values? Their values and what they want is the reason a CEO was hired at an organization. If the CEO's personal values do not match the values for the organization, it's a bad fit and they should part ways.
The issue is statistically you aren't a fantastic coder. At least not so much so that any organization can't find an equavalent person who isn't on the wrong side of history.
The paradox comes from the fact most people (and it seems even more than most in this industry) believe themselves "special" or "above average" when in reality that can't be the case. You don't get to (or at least shouldn't) "buy out" of the social contract just for being spectacular (and again, odds are very poor as to whether you actually have anything unique to add).
This can result in tragedy, as in the case of Turning, or justice, as in the case of the laundry list of sexual predators falling from grace currently. Pretending everyone you disagree with is just "politics" ignores the fact that no man is an island and everything is connected. Once you realize you aren't special; the world/society doesn't owe you shit life will get a lot easier.
>>If I am deeply opposed <<a particular cause or ideology>> [but don't let it affect with how I interact with people in my role], but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
> This, of course, continues further, with things such as Hollywood blacklisting (today) Conservatives
Hollywood does not blacklist "conservatives". Hollywood (finally) blacklists people who have outright abused their positions, sometimes for decades, to rape women.
If we are talking about an individual contributor, who only contributes code, who doesn‘t talk to press or customers, then I agree, their political beliefs shouldn‘t get them fired.
But if someone represents an organisation, whether internally or externally, their political beliefs are relevant; their actions are reflected as actions of the company.
Humans don‘t differentiate between personal and official life as much as you think they should, so unfortunately companies and organisations can‘t ignore what their representatives do in their spare time.
The post by cs1717p seems somewhat reasonable on the surface but causes a massive visceral backlash in my gut as I read it. So, while I haven't given it enough thought to figure out why, I vehemently disagree.
I disagree about the Mozilla CEO comment specifically. If something is antithetical to you and other community members, regardless of the original "purpose" of a community, so be it.
[+] [-] heisenbit|8 years ago|reply
Past transgressions now have an impact today often way beyond the statues of limitation. In most of these discussions the reason these statues exist are ignored. Discussions in one place affect another place. Behavior that is questionable in a classroom becomes national news. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software.
When boundaries are torn down cultures clash. Some of it may be healthy. But without boundaries would there be culture?
[+] [-] Cyberdog|8 years ago|reply
Okay. Under my real name/identity, I was once upon a time a substantial contributor to the Drupal project, a PHP-based CMS/web dev framework.
Earlier this year, we had a kerfluffle where someone had a grudge against Larry "Crell" Garfield, a core developer, liaison to the wider PHP community, and just general pillar of the Drupal community for over a decade. This person shared activity that Crell had done in the "Gor" (kinda BSDM plus fantasy cosplay) community, which, IIRC, included private forum posts, a dating site profile, and a slideshow deck he had presented from a convention. All of this stuff was from private web sites; eg, ones where you'd have to at least sign up for an account to get access to.
The person with the grudge, who, as far as I know, has yet to be identified, provided this material to the Drupal Association as evidence that Crell, a typical SV leftist in most respects, was actually a closeted unrepentant misogynist who needed to be kicked out of the community. Battle lines were drawn, with some agreeing that he was trash while others felt that his out-of-community behavior had no effect on all the hard work he had done and could still do within it. And bickering happened instead of collaboration and coding.
Ultimately the Association came down on the side of the agitators and disinvited Crell from his speaking position at the next Drupalcon, where he had always been prevalent. Expectedly, he became quite bitter about this and has somewhat voluntarily withdrawn further from the community.
So now a talented developer and decade-plus community member has been effectively kicked out of the community for personal, private kinks he, by all accounts, took great care to keep private and separate from this community.
Due to this and other reasons, I now use pseudonyms when joining new communities, and now some of my best OSS work is being done under a pseudonym I have taken care to keep air-gapped from my real identity - not great for my career, but I know that I, as a human, have quirks and kinks as well that others would just love to judge me by, and it's apparently what we have to do nowadays in order to be judged by our work rather than our pasts and out-of-community activity. And, frankly, I'm so disgusted by what happened to Crell that I too have disengaged from the community and no longer use Drupal as my framework of choice (though there are other reasons as well for the latter).
So, no. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature only affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software if you make it so.
Crell's first post about the incident: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing - see others on his blog for more.
[+] [-] 794CD01|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candiodari|8 years ago|reply
Looking at history I would even say that boundaries, as in the "need" to give a superior moral position to a favored class, whether an economic class, intellectuals, a military class, or priesthood, was always where these boundaries were. The thing you can't see is that your/our "boundaries" are no different.
And every single time, those boundaries turned out to be, not "for trade" (e.g. the Roman Empire), "for the military" (e.g. the second Islamic dynasty), intellectuals (e.g. the French revolution - the first part, or Communism in Eastern Europe) or "for morality" (e.g. the West in the middle ages). I mean, I'm sure there was a period of, say, a decade, where they actually did what it said on the label. It never lasted.
Every single time, those "boundaries" served to guarantee the comfort of a favored class. Firstly, to safeguard their positions of power and comfort, their fortunes, but later even their ideas and egos.
The real boundary we are wanting to impose is that "we are right".
And it's real, real simple. There is a tiny little issue:
We
Are
Wrong
Boundaries do impose structure. The structure does not change, and the world does. That's fundamentally why the boundaries are wrong and the structure will not hold.
I do not know how or where exactly we are wrong, but we are wrong (although I have some ideas: any 5 year old, old enough to talk intelligently, but not old enough to be assimilated yet, will tell you when you walk with them through any city what we are terribly wrong about. There's plenty, I might add).
And that sucks. If it turns out that we are most catastrophically wrong about a moral issue, it will suck REAL bad. And that's happened before. Plenty of times.
It is funny how you see the bay area aging. When we started out, most were in our late teens, early twenties at best. And of course we all felt the same: society is VERY wrong. In all sorts of ways. For instance, women are not different, and certainly not inferior. We KNEW that 20 years ago. But now we're 40, and we feel that, dammit, we're right. And these kids, who seem to prefer economic gains over social issues. Lazy bastards !
And, like the rich 30 years ago, we've decided (whilst having pretty much every creature comfort we like) that moral issues (that just happen to keep our place in society safe and secure) are real important. And these upstart youngsters (who do not in fact enjoy many of our creature comforts), they're bad, mmmkay ! Dammit ! They MUST be stopped.
They will, of course, defeat us. Nothing can stop them.
And they will clobber more than some of our ideas.
And, they will abandon some of our morals.
The thing is, this is a good and healthy thing to happen.
[+] [-] eponeponepon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjg59|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyfan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croon|8 years ago|reply
But as we've seen in the last year, complete anonymity and untraceability everywhere can have bad consequences; astro-turfing, smurfing, attention-ddos:ing, FUD, anti-net neutrality-comment identity theft.
In some of these cases a central e-ID (which a lot of nations have) could have mitigated those issues, in others, not so.
Ideas should live on their own merit, in which case the identity of the source is irrelevant, but (pardon my French) idiots make the case that logic and merit of ideas don't take center stage. In those cases I believe it's kind of relevant to know if you're buying into group think that is 80% bots, 5% trolls, 5% adversarial agents, etc.
Anonymity is one solution to the problem of being able to keep dissenting opinions, but a solution with severe side effects. Transparency with a strong protection of freedom of ideas is another route.
I guess to put it succinctly: I don't need to know the names or faces of the people I carry conversations with, only that they're real, unique people. It shouldn't matter, but recent history shows otherwise.
[+] [-] Dowwie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkerrekfjk|8 years ago|reply
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
It's interesting the "complainer" ended up being hired by github then fired from the same github.
[+] [-] arkades|8 years ago|reply
Rephrase as: when should your public reputation among one set of people affect your public reputation among another set of people? When should that latter effect result in consequences?
And then the answer is obvious: whenever the latter set of people find your public behavior to be unwelcome, regardless of which context you chose to unveil it in.
[+] [-] vlehto|8 years ago|reply
To detach the situation from current feelings, let's take a time trip back to hypothetical year ~1975.
Let's say it's illegal to register a NGO, company or anything that has a rule of "no sexual group X allowed". Now let's say that there is some guy who is absolutely brilliant at playing the violin, but has at some point allegedly done some homosexual approach to straight guy. Which any gay would have just brushed away, but now it was taken as harassment.
We have obviously created a situation where it's impossible for that violinist to take part in any orchestra. No "only gays & women orchesta" is allowed by law. Society completely wastes that human resource. Some male musicians somewhere possibly have slightly better work security. But the cost is that millions of people never hear the recordings of that great violinist.
You have to pick:
A. Allow organizations to be completely self selecting. This would have a set of short term problems and it's currently not kosher at all.
B. Allow alleged transgressors to somehow wipe their record clear. Seems practically impossible during internet age and click headlines.
C. Force people to be cool about people who have allegedly transgressed in some way in some other social setting. But now you lose productivity of whole teams, not just some individuals here and there.
D. Lose a lot of human resources. And probably for petty reasons. If allegation is enough, you can destroy too competitors easily. As shown by the red scare, Stalins purges, etc.
This was originally a case about a programmer allegedly groping some women. Seems like if you could start a company of "former sexual harassers inc", you could soon hire lots of splendid talent dirt cheap. Then you just need to somehow hide the origin of the products being made to the consumers. But soon even that won't matter much if there is anything to be learned from the music industry.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] explainplease|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway-hn123|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] matt4077|8 years ago|reply
It used to be that you interacted almost exclusively face-to-face, within a small community. One of the better consequences was a sort of instant feedback loop, where your actions that hurt others were quickly reflected back onto you: abandoned your ailing grandmother? The local grocer will stop giving you credit.
These were social feedback mechanisms. They have the benefit of being much more subtle than the criminal justice system, and kicking in much earlier.
It’s ridiculous how some in the tech community pretend these mechanisms don’t exist, or that they should not exist: every time you have decided who to invite to your birthday party, or who to sit with at lunch, you have taken such considerations into account.
People are social animals. They use social cues to reward beneficial actions, and punish even slight misdeeds. This is necessary to establish standards of behavior, or basic human decency.
There should be limits to this process, the most important of which is time. No one should be forced to reveal to his neighbors that he is a “sex offender”, ten years after drunkenly taking a piss in a public park. Nor should your teenage shenanigans be the top hit in google for eternity.
But standing a front of a synagogue on a Saturday, with a torch, a gun, a swastika flag? Yeah, you better believe your friends and coworkers will look funny at you come Monday.
[+] [-] rthille|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saalweachter|8 years ago|reply
Behavior outside a community should have consequences inside it when it has consequences inside it.
If your behavior outside of a community causes an uproar and crisis inside the community when it becomes known, it has already had a consequence inside the community. It will already have future ramifications. All you can do at that point is decide whether you want the future ramifications to include a commendation, condemnation or silence from the community.
Communities are not hermetically sealed environments. In my opinion it is silly and childish to pretend they are.
[+] [-] explainplease|8 years ago|reply
When "it becomes known" is a matter of one person going on a moral crusade to destroy the other person's reputation and position because of something about them, wholly unrelated to the project, which they personally dislike--is it still valid for there to be "consequences" within the community?
If so, it seems like only a matter of time for all of us, because surely all of us do things or hold opinions that someone else in a community we participate in would find unacceptable. Therefore, all that is required for anyone to destroy anyone else is to "cause an uproar and crisis" about them.
What will you say when someone causes an uproar and crisis about you?
[+] [-] fzeroracer|8 years ago|reply
When people seem to talk about consequence in this manner they seem to mean that 'People should stop caring about what other people have said or done', even if it means ignoring things like how a person believes you are literally a lesser human being due to some trait you were born with. 'Diversity of Thought' as a statement has been latched onto as being an excuse rather than its original purpose.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|8 years ago|reply
At the heart of a lot of this is the simple question: is our larger world supposed to be one big social group? Some folks think yes. For those folks, if you have a small community, it's a legitimate question as to how much "control" you should have on members when they are outside that community.
To me this is an answered question and the answer is no, small groups and large groups of people are completely different things. Trying to shoe-horn experiences and ideas about one group into the other group leads to nothing but heartache and disappointment.
But since so many folks are struggling so much, it's a conversation that needs to continue for a while. Hopefully it will lead somewhere positive.
ADD: I will, however, admit to having much frustration watching my tech friends struggle so much with concepts that should have been part of their early education. Speaking humorously, I reserve the right to buy an inflatable copy of "On Liberty" and start beating a few of them about the head with it if things don't change.
[+] [-] adrienne|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wisty|8 years ago|reply
Also, just for fun, google "Ted Ts'o".
[+] [-] joncrane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syshum|8 years ago|reply
The wider political climate in world today is making have to be that simple.
While the article talks about more extreme cases like actual physical sexual assault, today far far far too many communities are using simple political disagreement and criticism and framing that as "harassment" using that "harassment" as method to remove any political dissenters from their ranks
I have seen it attempted (some times with great success) in several open source projects.
Personally I dislike the very concept of Codes of Conduct and I generally oppose most of the terms in many of the more modern Code of Conduct being pushed forward, likely as a result of my very libertarian political views. That said Codes of Conducts (should a community or project adopt them) should only be enforced based on actions WITH IN that community and/or toward people that are IN THAT community.
Not generalized actions of people taken in other communities with a different set of conventions and rules.
Code of Conduct should be seen as a contract of Behavior that all people agree to when voluntary associating with the community to treat all other MEMBERS of that community based on that code of conduct, it should not apply to conduct when interacting with people not a part of that community and thus never agreed to the code of conduct.
[+] [-] naturalgradient|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexandercrohde|8 years ago|reply
For example, as stated, the question includes questions like: - Should America care if somebody is convicted of a crime by a foreign nation?
- Should a school care if a candidate to be a teacher was discovered viewing child pornography?
- Should a job care if/why you got fired from your last job?
- Should you care why your ex's last relationship failed?
The answer to all of these is obviously "depends on the specifics." It's tempting to draw hard boundaries so as to prevent people from weaponizing politics. Unfortunately, I just don't think hard-boundaries are coherent here.
[+] [-] geebee|8 years ago|reply
One thing some of the comments have touched on is the notion of "beyond the pale" - a term that somewhat ironically (for this discussion) refers to occurrences outside the bounds of British law. There are opinions that fall outside the standards of decency, and this can, legitimately, make organizations reluctant to work with some people.
Many issue positions, over time, can go from widely accepted, to controversial, to widely discredited, to beyond the pale, essentially and uncontroversially indecent. If this is the case, it's almost certain that we're going through this process right now. Unfortunately, there is also a strong political tendency to scold and smear and be as uncharitable as possible to the other side. In aggregate, people get accused of being on the "wrong side of history" at least twice as often as they actually are, since these accusations go in both directions on virtually every controversial topic.
[+] [-] quotemstr|8 years ago|reply
I am disappointed in the contemporary trend to invest imaginary "harms" and propose remedies that, in the end, boil down to persecuting people for their beliefs. Altman is definitely right about the social atmosphere in tech. Imagining that we should, say, ban contributions to an open source project from someone who also participates in 4chan is part of the problem.
[+] [-] CM30|8 years ago|reply
And I stick by that for communities I run. On every site I'm an admin/founder, the rule is that (legal issues excepting), we won't punish you for things done outside of the community. It's not our place to do so, and we have no interest in witch hunting or trying to find reasons to deplatform people for things they do in their free time elsewhere.
[+] [-] danschumann|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs1717p|8 years ago|reply
Examples of this:
Alan Turing -- father of Computer Science shunned, at the time, because everyone had value judgements regarding his homosexuality (completely irrelevant to Computer Science).
The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This, of course, continues further, with things such as Hollywood blacklisting (today) Conservatives, and formerly Communists.
The solution is simple:
Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
If I am deeply opposed to gay marriage, but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
If I strongly believe in UFO visitations, and disbelieve climate change, but am a great graphic designer, that should not affect my reputation as an artist.
Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.
This inability to separate emotions and passions from cooperating on a shared focus with others, of differing emotions and passions, but equal interest in the shared focus (community) is deeply damaging.
There are enough problems and difficulties getting skilled people together to work on something great -- there is no use at all in reducing that crowd of people further by limiting it to those who share ones views in any number of hot button issues.
Leave politics to your political circles, make your own impressions of people before making personal judgements from reputation, find every reason to work together, not any excuse not to.
[+] [-] menacingly|8 years ago|reply
I personally tend to break conservatively in my views, but I would be equally outraged if a liberal were fired for supporting, say, communist revolution. I certainly understand why people who hold certain views would want that person fired, but I have no problem separating that from their work. I wouldn't want them running my country, but Mozilla is fine.
I ultimately arrived at the outcome that in order to be consistent, I don't think it's OK for any _position_ someone takes to be considered for work performance. Actions, sure, but a position must have absolute freedom. So, if my CEO were to consider people who vote for republicans subhuman (not an entirely unlikely scenario today), but otherwise conducted themselves fairly, I'd be OK with it.
So, did Eich take a position, or an action? Are you really allowed to have a position if you aren't allowed to support it?
I'll say action, despite my bias urging me to say position. Was this action taken to support his desire to preserve something, or to deny someone else of something? If you're one of the people impacted by this action, does it matter?
These questions make it easy to see the tough position Mozilla was in. I'm not sure what conclusion I'd have reached in their shoes, despite my from-the-hip decision that he did nothing wrong.
[+] [-] pjc50|8 years ago|reply
Do you think someone can really work effectively with their gay married co-contributors in this case?
Being inclusive is great, but you have to recognise that including certain people drives others away from the project.
[+] [-] ChrisSD|8 years ago|reply
He was fired as CEO, not as CTO or any other technical position. The CEO is meant to represent the organisation. Denying rights to individuals goes against Mozilla's ethos and detracts from its campaign goals. Put simply, if the CEO isn't supported by their org then they are an ineffective CEO.
[+] [-] SolaceQuantum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilde|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwvvvvwx|8 years ago|reply
Probably quite relevant to his position as CEO of an organisation that employs (and would like to hire) LGBT people.
[+] [-] coward00001|8 years ago|reply
I would add that for contributions outside of the community, they should be judged if they relate to that community.
For instance, if a a security expert, goes out to conferences telling people to use MFA, but privately tells people not to use it because it is "too complicated" that person would rightly be judged by the community. (Note: I mean they regularly make that reccomendation privately, not a one-off because they don't want to tell their grandparent to use MFA).
> The Mozilla CEO fired for his personal donation in opposition to gay marriage. (Again, completely irrelevant to his relationship with the Mozilla project).
This is complicated for roles like CEO, they don't have a specific _technical_ role. Their role is the define the vision and direction of the company. I believe that part of the CEO job to define the values and mores for the organization, if this is wrong, let me know as that is kind of fundamental to my point.
In that case, wouldn't it be right that that a CEO is fired for their values? Their values and what they want is the reason a CEO was hired at an organization. If the CEO's personal values do not match the values for the organization, it's a bad fit and they should part ways.
[+] [-] appearsonline|8 years ago|reply
>This whole question really stems from a sad and pervasive tendency for 'intelligent' people to overestimate their general expertise
to
>Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.
and then justify that with
>Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.
I'm not sure you agree with yourself.
[+] [-] lordCarbonFiber|8 years ago|reply
The paradox comes from the fact most people (and it seems even more than most in this industry) believe themselves "special" or "above average" when in reality that can't be the case. You don't get to (or at least shouldn't) "buy out" of the social contract just for being spectacular (and again, odds are very poor as to whether you actually have anything unique to add).
This can result in tragedy, as in the case of Turning, or justice, as in the case of the laundry list of sexual predators falling from grace currently. Pretending everyone you disagree with is just "politics" ignores the fact that no man is an island and everything is connected. Once you realize you aren't special; the world/society doesn't owe you shit life will get a lot easier.
[+] [-] gadders|8 years ago|reply
>>If I am deeply opposed <<a particular cause or ideology>> [but don't let it affect with how I interact with people in my role], but a fantastic coder, that should not affect my standing within a community that is entirely code focused.
[+] [-] mschuster91|8 years ago|reply
Hollywood does not blacklist "conservatives". Hollywood (finally) blacklists people who have outright abused their positions, sometimes for decades, to rape women.
[+] [-] jakobegger|8 years ago|reply
But if someone represents an organisation, whether internally or externally, their political beliefs are relevant; their actions are reflected as actions of the company.
Humans don‘t differentiate between personal and official life as much as you think they should, so unfortunately companies and organisations can‘t ignore what their representatives do in their spare time.
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|8 years ago|reply
I disagree about the Mozilla CEO comment specifically. If something is antithetical to you and other community members, regardless of the original "purpose" of a community, so be it.
[+] [-] stillhere|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] junkscience2017|8 years ago|reply
real shame we don't have a President Sanders...yes, really, oh yes I agree...
[+] [-] throwwayirony|8 years ago|reply
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