[Numpy-discussion] Adoption of a Code of Conduct (original) (raw)

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Wed Aug 1 20:57:32 EDT 2018

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:37 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 8:12 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 1, 2018 at 12:20 AM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote: I realize this was probably brought up in the discussions about the scipy code of conduct which I have not looked at, but I’m troubled by the inclusion of “political beliefs” in the document. It was not brought up explicitly as far as I remember. See e.g. https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/5 That's about moving names around. I don't see any mention of political beliefs? Sorry about that, I elided the 6. This is the correct link: https://github.com/jupyter/governance/pull/56 Thanks, that's useful context for your question. I'm personally not too attached to "political belief", but I think the discussion in that PR and in the OSCON context is very US-centric and reflective of the polarized atmosphere there. If everyone is fine with removing political beliefs then I'm fine with that, but I don't think that the argument itself (from a non-US perspective) has much merit.

Probably a plurality of contributors are from the US though, so we can't exactly hand-wave away how it reads in the US...

As a thought experiment, what if someone’s political beliefs imply that other contributors are not deserving of human rights? Increasingly ideas like this are coming into the mainstream worldwide and I think this is a real concern that should be considered.

There is a difference between having beliefs, and expressing those beliefs in ways that offends others. I don't see any problem with saying that we welcome anyone, irrespective of political belief. However, if someone starts expressing things that are intolerant (like someone else not deserving human rights) on any of our communication forums or in an in-person meeting, that would be a clear violation of the CoC. Which can be dealt with via the reporting and enforcement mechanism in the CoC. I don't see a problem here, but I would see a real problem with removing the "political beliefs" phrase.

I think there's two separate issues here: (a) whether things people express outside our forums should be considered relevant within our forums, (b) what we're communicating by calling out "political belief" as a thing that we won't exclude people over.

This isn't happening in a vacuum either... if you search for "lambdaconf" you can see a ton of discussion about a programming conference that decided to invite a guy who's a high-profile leader in the pro-feudalism / pro-white-supremacism community (I can't believe I'm typing that), and then conference justified it by saying things like "we're supporting diversity of beliefs" and "this talk is purely about his technical work, let's keep politics out of it". As it turns out, the technical work in question is actually super tied to his political activism -- like in the original version of the system, his crypto key was the "king" that gave him ultimate authority, which he could delegate to "dukes", etc. (IIRC -- I'm not looking up the details, but it was something about that blatant.) Also all kinds of cult-y stuff about how contributors were special chosen ones, them against the world -- it was super creepy. But then he got VC funding, because of course he did, and went through and renamed things as a figleaf, so they could claim it was "purely technical".

FWIW, my personal opinion is that I'm categorically uninterested in working with anyone like that. I don't care if they only say the ghastly things in non-numpy channels or claim that it's "merely a political disagreement", I'm still not interested.

For another perspective on this issue see https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/, where Coraline Ada describes her reasons for not speaking at OSCON this year due to a similar clause in the code of conduct. There's a lot of very unrealistic examples in that post. Plus retracting a week in advance of a conference is, to put it mildly, questionable. So not sure what to think of the rest of that post. There may be good points in there, but they're obscured by the obvious flaws in thinking and choice of examples.

Ralf, I love you, but this paragraph sounds like a parody from "How to suppress women's writing" or something.

Coraline Ada is a prominent expert on code-of-conduct issues, and also a trans woman, so she gets death threats and other harassment constantly and "will the conference organizers protect me if someone comes after me?" is a real question she has to ask. She wrote a blog post about how O'Reilly's handling of this (not just the language, but the totality of circumstances -- the way it was added, the response to her queries, etc.) made her feel that attending would be unsafe for her, so she didn't attend. (And about how distressed she was to realize this just a week before the conference.)

It seems like you're taking her post as some logical argument about CoCs in the abstract, with the withdrawal as some kind of brinksmanship, and judging it by those standards?

FWIW, the Sage Sharp who's quoted at the beginning of Ada's post and initially raised the issue, is also well-known expert on CoC issues, e.g. PyCon hired them to help revamp their policies and respond to incidents this year [1].

When experts say that something is a bad idea, and when the people who a CoC is supposed to protect says it makes them feel unsafe, I feel like we should listen to that.

I also thought that the points made in the Jupyter discussion thread made a lot of sense: of course it's possible for people to start harassing each other over any excuse, and a CoC can, should, and does make clear that that's not OK. But if you specifically call out political affiliation as a protected class, at a time when lots of the people who the CoC is trying to protect are facing governmental harassment justified as "mere political disagreement", then it really sends the wrong message.

Besides, uh... isn't the whole definition of politics that it's topics where there is active debate? Not really sure why it's even in that list to start with.

-n

[1] https://pycon.blogspot.com/2018/04/code-of-conduct-updates-for-pycon-2018.html

-- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org

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