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Good point. My expected reaction isn't "laws/CoC should be discarded" but "CoCs and their enforcement process is seriously flawed and needs revising." Here the

Good point. My expected reaction isn't "laws/CoC should be discarded" but "CoCs and their enforcement process is seriously flawed and needs revising." Here there seem to be two issues: 1. Too-vague rules & 2. Unfair enforcement. If we punished people for murder by forming a posse and summarily executing them, the reaction should be "yes murder should be forbidden but this enforcement process is seriously unfair and needs to be overhauled." If we punish people for "being unkind" the reaction should be "this rule is unfair because it's not clear how one can go about following it and it is likely to be enforced highly subjectively which is likely to lead to enforcement based on personal bias, favoritism etc.." What I think the author might see if he examined the situation with an open mind is that "be kind" (a rule he doesn't like) and "don't be sexist" (a rule he likes) both suffer from the issue of being vague and susceptible to extremely subjective interpretation. Reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about what is "kind," what is "sexist," or what is "racist," but these rules ignore this fact and take an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to kindness, sexism, racism etc. that is subject to the problems of arbitrariness, bias, and favoritism in all cases. I'm "haha"ing at the fact that the author refuses to consider this aspect of the problem: that it goes beyond just his case (other people think he's bad) to the cases of people that he thinks are bad.

Volundr 6y ago
I'd agree with all of this, with the caveat that at lot of what your saying is both called out in the article and in a lot of advice around writing a code of conduct (example: https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/ https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/howto-design-a-code-of-...), so it's not even clear to me that this is a problem with the majority of the CoC organizations/enforcement. Even here where part of the problem in the vague requirement ("be kind"), the biggest problem is they didn't follow their own processes of having an actual dialog. It's a bit like if you walked into a US court and the Judge immediately says "I talked to the victim and your clearly guilty", it's not the process that's the problem, it's that the process wasn't followed. Maybe like the court system there should be an appeals process (not sure what that might look like).
belorn 6y ago
If we change the analogy we get a different answer. Everyone agree that murder should be forbidden, but we don't want mob justice to go around lynching suspected murderers. As a society we have laws. CoC as extrajudicial rules get judged based on their benefit to extend existing laws and append additional law enforcement on top of already existing law enforcement. If the result is bad and the additional rules causes more problem than they solve then they should be discarded. It does not mean all extrajudicial rules are bad but we need to ask if they are needed, serve a good purpose, measure the outcome, and be ready to discard them when the situation calls for it.

Volundr 6y ago

I'd agree with all of this, with the caveat that at lot of what your saying is both called out in the article and in a lot of advice around writing a code of conduct (example: https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/howto-design-a-code-of-conduct-for-your-community/ https://adainitiative.org/2014/02/18/howto-design-a-code-of-...), so it's not even clear to me that this is a problem with the majority of the CoC organizations/enforcement. Even here where part of the problem in the vague requirement ("be kind"), the biggest problem is they didn't follow their own processes of having an actual dialog. It's a bit like if you walked into a US court and the Judge immediately says "I talked to the victim and your clearly guilty", it's not the process that's the problem, it's that the process wasn't followed. Maybe like the court system there should be an appeals process (not sure what that might look like).

belorn 6y ago

If we change the analogy we get a different answer. Everyone agree that murder should be forbidden, but we don't want mob justice to go around lynching suspected murderers. As a society we have laws. CoC as extrajudicial rules get judged based on their benefit to extend existing laws and append additional law enforcement on top of already existing law enforcement. If the result is bad and the additional rules causes more problem than they solve then they should be discarded. It does not mean all extrajudicial rules are bad but we need to ask if they are needed, serve a good purpose, measure the outcome, and be ready to discard them when the situation calls for it.