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rgladwell
3 years ago
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Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time.
I think some people could benefit from doing less work at a higher quality.
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Largely because the majority, maybe the vast majority, of software being written today is being written to solve problems introduced by previous software. Add to this Sturgeon’s Law, and in general the strong sense that what passes for thought in Silicon Valley is profoundly ignorant and ahistorical, and it feels to me like we’ve entered a negative feedback loop where what stinks today is going to be cast into future generations' immutable truth.
I’m not some kind of nostalgia junkie; software has always been terrible. It’s just that there’s so much more of it now. And most software in the world isn’t being written in Silicon Valley; but the culture of the Valley is held as an exemplar, and other software cultures are being ignored and forgotten.
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I’m not some kind of nostalgia junkie; software has always been terrible.
Agreed. The overall state of software is so very bad, it’s downright disgusting. I think almost every day of my life there’s some moment when some piece of software I am using, whether it’s on a PC, tablet, phone, or “other”, misbehaves in a way that makes me want to pull my last hair out and scream. The running joke around the office is how at least once a week, I throw a tantrum and insist I’m swearing off technology altogether and joining the Amish. And it’s not that far from being the truth!
Seriously, it’s 2015 and VPNs still suck donkey balls, there isn’t a decent web browser in existence, networks are ridiculously unreliable… the list goes on and on.
Probably the best thing I can say about software these days is this: almost every app I use on my laptop on a regular basis has some kind of auto-save / session resume feature, so I can just power my laptop off and go, and then resume everything later without much fuss. And that’s handy given how quirky the hibernate/resume feature is on my current laptop running Fedora Linux.
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How do we square this with “move fast and break stuff”?
Given that software is going to be in a state of broken-ness most of the time, might as well get on with in rather than attempt to make it perfect before creating it, right?
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I agree with the sentiment, perhaps for different reasons. Would like to hear what jfb would say.
Software: a series of human devised names, that compile down to bitwise representations that can be interpreted as data or as an instruction. It’s “names all the way down”. We’re essentially involved in a business not unlike law, there’s a bunch of human defined rules in interpreted language also interpreted by humans (who wrote the interpreter / compiler / API / DSL / … list goes on - incidently, think of how many languages one might need to learn for a Ruby On Rails deployment. I can count > 6.)
More software, more complexity. More complexity, higher cost to solve problems.
Ultimately we want to be governed by physical constraints in what’s possible. An average program uses the work of 1000’s of others - this is how it’s going to be - but, strong design are diluted. I like to think software is in it’s cambrian explosion - lots of weird asymmetrical shit floating around, unsettled on any decent design, in the lieu of deliberative intentional design, waiting for physical constraints to weed out the unfit designs.
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<cynical>I’m working my way through the Breaking Smart essays and one of the points brought up is that the progress the author is talking about is not zero-sum, but rather creates wealth. I think he is right, but I do wonder what percentage of that wealth is purely incestual in that it is fixing the junk created by the whole process? How man consultants are billing hours becase the industry brute-forces itself into so complex solutions they need specialists just to manage the complexity of their own creation.</cynical>
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I think some people could benefit from doing less work at a higher quality.
Absolutely agreed, but I think the OP here has some good points. I especially agree with the bit about how a todo list that you don’t quickly complete items off of, becomes one where you only add stuff to it. I think I may, er, have experienced that phenomenon myself. :-(
But in the end, like everything in life, there are tradeoffs to be made to suit the moment and the task at hand. And it will always be a judgment call on whether to work as fast as possible, or focus on quality.
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Direct link to the code: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html
ok, so I generally think having a code of conduct is bullshit (oops, sorry, language). You’ve already lost if this is something you need. Attempting to enumerate the badness leads to absurdity, and this crosses the line.
I’m on the fringe of the FreeBSD community, but it’s clear now that I can’t join. Sooner or later somebody is going to harass somebody else, and I’m going to ignore it, but then that makes me guilty of “condoning” harassment.
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Oh, one more thing I forgot:
Attempting to enumerate the badness leads to absurdity,
You have two options here: try to enumerate behaviors, or leave it up to interpretation. The first falls under the kind of criticism you’re offering here, and the second leads to an argument about how the rules aren’t written down, and therefore, can’t be applied fairly.
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Oh, it’s not about the effectiveness, I’ve just seen countless concern trolls play the “but how will I know if I’ve crossed a line unless it’s explicitly spelled out because social norms are totally arbitrary and I just say it like it is” in response to a community attempting to enact a code of conduct before.
(I personally am in favor of enumerating broad categories of behavior and leaving it at that.)
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Open-source projects often don’t have the strong leadership that would make that happen. E.g. Tony Morris is still upsetting people on
#scala(or was when I gave up on it a few weeks ago) where any decent organization or leader would long since have kicked him out, and I think the bungled, unclear code of conduct had a lot to do with that.
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I don’t think, for example, that Python has “lost” by having a code of conduct. Pycon has 1/3 female attendance and speakers, in large part due to its code of conduct and many other outreach programmes. What other tech conference has lineups for the women’s bathroom?
Being more inclusive is good for everyone, both the people doing the including and the ones being included. You can’t achieve this without actively doing outreach. Just sitting there and waiting for it to happen doesn’t make it happen.
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Was it Pycon that had a very public incident that started with one person complaining about a sexist joke (and very explicitly claiming the code-of-conduct supported their complaint) and ended with multiple people losing their jobs? It’s conceivable that in the absence of a code that incident would have been less confrontational and ended less badly.
Inclusiveness does benefit everyone, but nothing is completely free. I think codes like this are on balance a good thing (and this is one of the better-written examples IMO: it’s relatively explicit and objective), but let’s not oversell them. Any such thing imposes overhead (especially for people who already have trouble expressing themselves, or who are anxious about participating in a community), and runs the risk of becoming a weapon for the popular or politically astute to attack the weak with.
I do support this code. But caution is warranted.
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with multiple people losing their jobs?
It ended with one of the offenders losing their job and finding a new one within a week or two, and the reporter losing their job by having their employer be DDOSed, then not being able to find a new job for over a year due to the stigma, almost putting them on the street. And getting graphic death threats almost continually, still to this day.
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Ummm, given that Adria was the attacker, I don’t see that as being particularly unreasonable (other than the death threat part). We’re never going to grow as a society if we don’t hold men and women to the same standards.
Additionally, it looks like Adria spent the better part of that year justifying to herself that her actions were right:
“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-shaming-lindsey-stone-jon-ronson
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given that Adria was the attacker,
I don’t agree with this characterization. She reported an event that happened, after that, it was up to the conference to decide what to do here. She didn’t even inaccurately report it, the actual circumstances were never in question.
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She reported an event that happened
It was a while ago, so my memory may not be the clearest, but as I recall she took a picture of the guy (initially people thought some other guy in the picture was the culprit!), and tweeted it to the whole world along with commentary. The pycon conference staff actually contacted her via twitter after seeing the posting. Seemed like an odd way to report something overheard at a conference to staff.
Making a dongle/dick joke at a conference is very inappropriate. No disagreement there. The “let’s make an example out of this guy” response seemed rather outsized.
In addition, maybe instead of just firing him, his employer could have sent the guy to some type of sensitivity training so he actually learned something other than the likelihood that he just picked up some new prejudice like “it is not safe to have women in your team – you might get fired” or “don’t ever go to conferences”. I consider companies generally pretty heartless though, so it wasn’t surprising that he was simply fired – arguably the fastest way to distance themselves from the issue entirely.
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The exact text of the tweet:
Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles. Right behind me #pycon
Yes, one could argue that she could have reported it in private instead of in public, but especially tagging it with
#pycon, to me, is reporting. The entirety of the ‘commentary’ is “Not cool.” -
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Seriously, “the attacker”? And earlier “a very public incident that started with one person complaining about a sexist joke”? The complaint about the issue is undoubtedly the problem. Nah, it started with the snickering innuendo. Too often this site feels like browsing HN Jr.
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Yeah, donglegate. Not sure I would say that this would have never happened if there wasn’t a code of conduct. In fact, it may not have happened in a vacuous way: without a code conduct, there would not have been 20% female participation which would have made it much less likely for any women to overhear. Without any women, there are no women who will voice complaints. :-)
I really don’t think there is an overt benefit to not having a code of conduct. The only one I can see is if you want to keep your community insular and unwelcoming. Like everything else in human society, as long as there’s more than a few of us, we need rules to guide us.
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You’ve already lost if this is something you need.
This is why Rust is a moribund language tended to by a community of lifeless, gray dullards devoid of insight or imagination, plodding along the same worn paths trodden by the endless parade of sightless generations before them. All this misery could have been avoided had they but known the risk their code of conduct posed to their ability to say fuckwords in public lo those many years ago.
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(oops, sorry, language)
Most codes of conduct don’t include curse words, as being puritans is not the aim of a code of conduct.
You’ve already lost if this is something you need.
Codes of conduct are largely written plans to set expectations and make the process clear for when something doesn’t go according to plan. “you’ve already lost” is beside the point.
Any reasonable ops team has a plan for what to do in the case of system failure. Codes of conduct are no different.
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Most codes of conduct don’t include curse words, as being puritans is not the aim of a code of conduct.
The problem with this is that, as written, the code of conduct kinda does:
- Avoid foul or abusive language: remember that cultural standards differ, and that what may seem to you to be a very mild statement can be deeply shocking to another.
The core issue is that, I think, as developers and engineers we tend to read things rather literally, and any code of conduct read in such a way seems rather harsh and draconian.
And the natural response is “Well, that’s what it says, sure, but that’s just level-setting and a general zeitgeist…we’re not going to go after you for cursing/whatever”, and that basically illustrates to the person raising the concern the arbitrariness built into the enforcement of these things.
It’s not that they’re bad (hell, they’re arguably better than nothing)–it’s just totally unsurprising that many don’t sing their praises.
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Yeah, it’s true that this one does. I was responding more generally. Rust’s actually does too, with an explicit caveat:
(Cursing is allowed, but never targeting another user, and never in a hateful manner.)
And
that basically illustrates to the person raising the concern the arbitrariness built into the enforcement of these things
Software developers do tend to see many social boundaries as ‘arbitrary’, but that doesn’t mean they actually are.
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What are some examples of non-arbitrary social boundaries?
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Basically all of them. Social boundaries come out of some kind of need for a community, you can call them ‘arbitrary’ in response to some sort of platonic ideal, what-if-society-was-totally-different, but that’s more thought experiment and not something that’s actually useful when interfacing with other humans or understanding the real world.
That doesn’t mean they’re immutable, or are all good boundaries, but with that definition of arbitrary, basically everything is arbitrary.
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I really shouldn’t fan the flames (these are always incendiary topics) but you can’t make everyone happy. All of the words used there (harassment, hate speech etc) are relative, regardless of what people believe.
To give an example, suppose a person comes on and during the course of a conversation expresses the view that homosexuality is an aberration and is illegal. The person is banned. The person then in turn claims harassment + discrimination because in their nation/culture/religion this is the commonly held view.
Now, I’ll shut up, because I came here to learn about computation.
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In “almost all” cases, general good will, cultural norms, and good manners covers relations between people in a group.
Obviously, there are special cases where arbitration is needed and this is the purpose of a code of conduct - to formalize what happens when normal (polite) interactions break down.
Often, the formation of a code of conduct is challenging because it gives rise to unspoken and unaired differences between members of the group. For example: what if one leading member supports an aggressive, hardball management style that involves profanity, public call-outs, and insults, while another leading member supports a gentle management style that focuses on one-on-one interactions and words of encouragement? (In the first case, I’m thinking of some of the famous public arguments about the Linux kernel.) Making one or the other style “formal” in a code of conduct means that one leader “wins” the debate over group culture, while the other one “loses”.
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So, most of that scans pretty decently–a little “no fun allowed” in terms of speech, sure, but if we can’t not sweat and curse and whatnot during a project, we lack creativity in expressing our displeasure.
The only part I disagree with:
- Discrimination based on gender, race, nationality, sexuality, religion, age or physical disability.
- Bullying or systematic harrassment.
- Incitement to or condoning of any of these.
…which is totally, reasonable on the face off it, especially the latter two. However, that links with:
“We will not tolerate any member of the community, either publically or privately giving aid or encouragement to any third party to behave in such a way towards any members of the FreeBSD community.”
If it’s truly a meritocracy, it shouldn’t matter if a contributor is a bigoted shithead on their own time. This linkage, for example, is technically what would’ve been used to censure, say, Eich.
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If it’s truly a meritocracy, it shouldn’t matter if a contributor is a bigoted shithead on their own time.
Only if you don’t include ‘works well with others’ as merit. I know I personally do.
One might say this brings up the ‘arbitrariness’ of the concept of meritocracy in the first place…
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“works well with others” is an interesting wagon to hitch to.
It opens the unfortunate can of worms of whether or not minority members who constantly fight the status quo and make noise are “working well with others”. Especially when they, say, derail Github issues with agendas orthogonal to code problems.
I’m not sure that bandying about fitting in is what we want to do here.
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You may think of it as derailing (and it’s not an entirely false or unreasonable opinion), but for every communication channel there should be a place to discuss issues with communication, and in cases of social issues it often makes sense to use the very same channel for that (just because all the participants are already present). E.g., if some aspect of your team’s weekly meetings renders these meetings ineffetive or intolerable, by all means bring it up during one of these meetings.
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To put it explicitly (and odiously, mind you):
If the argument is “works well with others is something of merit”, then any minority who fails to shut up and fall in line with the others is, by definition, not worthy of merit. This means putting up with homophobic remarks, because that’s what the majority of the workplace does. This means putting up with sexism, because that’s what the majority of the workplace does. This means not commenting/arguing/fighting-back against all of the microaggressions, because doing so puts you at odds with all the others.
That is the full ramification of “gets along well with others”.
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Likewise, every majority (is this the right word?) that issues racist/homophobic/misogynistic remarks is, by definition, not worthy of merit, because such remarks alienate current and potential employees and clients. Not only minorities, mind you — I feel uneasy interacting with chauvinists no matter where their hate is directed. And we haven’t mentioned wide-scale long-term effects of such attitudes being popular.
I really fail to imagine what kind of merit would override the fault of being a complete asshole.
This means putting up with homophobic remarks, because that’s what the majority of the workplace does. This means putting up with sexism, because that’s what the majority of the workplace does.
I’m sorry you had such a bad workplace experience. I hope it’s not typical where you live; where I live it’s surely unusual.
This means not commenting/arguing/fighting-back against all of the microaggressions, because doing so puts you at odds with all the others.
Oh, I’m not saying one should complain about every little annoyance, but there’s a not-so-fine line between calling your colleague an idiot once in anger, and doing it constantly due to lack of respect towards (a subset of) others.
Look… I find that people who like to use words such as “rationality” and “meritocracy” tend to ignore human feelings, which makes them less rational and meritocratic than they think they are, because feelings exist and have consequences in the real world. Working with sexists and homophobes is not nice. Even working in white-male-only environment is not as nice as in mixed one, I find. Not being able to hire minorities (and people like me, who don’t hate minorities but do hate nazis) matters, because you lose a percentage of potential employees, and perhaps clients as well. Do you really think banning sexism and racism would do more harm than alienating the aforementioned minorities?
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If it’s truly a meritocracy
Being a meritocracy is not in itself a good thing. I know how we nerds want to pretend that we humans are all beings of pure intellect and all that matters is your code. While well-intentioned, this attitude can end up causing harm by deliberately ignoring all of the extenuating non-intellectual factors that people have to contend with (try to read that link, despite its length).
Sure, we’re all beings of pure intellect, but some of us are female, which is a very rare trait in this tribe but common elsewhere, so this tribe ends up treating us differently or we perceive ourselves as being different from this tribe, despite its claims of equality.
The meritocracy attitude is a bit like “separate but equal” was in the southern USA of the 1950’s. While apparently well-intentioned and seeking to give everyone equal treatment, it attempts to silence a lot of other important cultural factors, which results in non-equality.
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Meritocracy is like a platonic ideal - it’s a point that most people want to get to; however, since people have different starting points, it’s impossible to realize in reality. The “merit” being measured is on one axis or a small number of axes, which generally need to be the ones that are most aligned with successful outcomes in projects.
The bigger picture of meritocracy, society-wide, is a fundamentally different question, and one that most open-source projects (and most for-profit companies, for that matter) are generally unequipped to handle. Most projects just want skilled and dedicated contributors (i.e. contributors with particular “merits”) and beggars can’t be choosers.
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By the way, did you know that the word was coined in the 1950’s in a satirical essay where a meritocratic society was a dystopia? :-)
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I think I heard that somewhere. Funny that it was considered something bad back then.
The sense I get from the usage of the word nowadays, is that it’s broadly considered a good thing among idealistic engineers and technical people: of course we should judge people only on their merit (e.g. the performance of their code), not on political considerations, or nepotism, or who went to school with whom.
Of course, since it’s people we’re talking about, things rarely get implemented as purely as the idealistic engineer believes or hopes.
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Sooner or later somebody is going to harass somebody else, and I’m going to ignore it, but then that makes me guilty of “condoning” harassment.
this is pure slippery-slope-fallacy. do you seriously think that someone is going to come after you for simply passively ignoring something?
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I think it should be possible for me to comply with not just the spirit, but also the letter, of a well written code of conduct. I’m not comfortable with the idea that the written rule says something is prohibited, but then there’s an unwritten rule that says minor infractions will probably go unnoticed.
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why, though? given that a code of conduct is run by people, rather than by computers, do you honestly feel that being subscribed to a mailing list in which someone is being harassed, and doing nothing either way, is going to be interpreted as against the letter of the code? it’s fine to apply a common-sense approach to these things, rather than going the heavyhanded legal-jargon, dot-every-i route.
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there are two different things here:
the specifics of the code of conduct. sure, it usually boils down to “don’t be a dick”, but what is considered dickish behaviour varies from community to community, and a good set of guidelines can help establish a culture by indicating what is and isn’t considered acceptable
the interpretation of the written form of the code. this is where some people really want to quibble about words and phrasing and how they can be interpreted and how close you can skate to the line without crossing it. but really, it comes down to common sense; a CoC is not a game that you’re trying to play, where it’s crucially important to drag out the rulebook and argue each point and whether the exact language supports you or the other person. most of these things are pretty easy to apply a reasonable interpretation to, and the people trying to game it are usually the people you don’t want around anyway, because they don’t really care about not being dicks.
to take the example tedu cited, he focused on the word “condoning”, and wondered whether simply sitting silently on a mailing list where harassment was taking place would technically be condoning said harassment, and whether he’d be expelled from the community for doing so. but a more reasonable interpretation would be that it applies to people managing spaces or events, and who would be expected to make sure their spaces are harassment free by taking note of and stopping it when it starts. if you simply assume that the CoC writers are trying to foster a good community rather than playing legal games, it’s pretty easy to follow it.
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I think ethics are really important. Codes of Conduct are one way of expressing your ethics.
Attempting to enumerate the badness leads to absurdity
Which is currently demonstrated by the British Governments approach to Encryption - “it is allowing the baddies to communicate securely” - this badness must be banned!
Condoning behaviour by ignoring it is not necessarily true - ask any parent who has had to negotiate with a two year old, sometimes ignoring a behaviour is the correct approach - but not when you are an officer in a military prison and your soldiers are abusing your prisoners.
Ethics are never black or white, but they might be right or wrong :~)
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One of the funny things about meritocracy is that it’s really more of a guiding principle, rather than a destination to be reached. It presupposes a few things like: a perfect metric for measuring “merit”, an absence of political or human considerations, an absence of history and memory in the system.
Wait. “He might squish you without ever even noticing.” is “advocating for physical intimidation and violence”? I thought the problem was Linus was a dick, but the problem is he made a joke?
I guess I shouldn’t trust this article either (though it does have the benefit of actually quoting and linking sources) but I can’t quite bring myself to research it further.
(For the record, I don’t think “sjw” is a productive term. This would come across as more balanced without the labeling.)
As others have noted, this is a one-sided cherry pick of dozens of conversations over a long time. It does link, further down, to another of Sarah’s posts - http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137391145411685&w=2 - where she links to examples of Linus being abrasive in general. I don’t think this is over any single incident. The mailing list archives are public, of course, if people really want to individually dig through them…
Something I’ve learned after observing a few incidents is that it’s counter productive to omit details to avoid drama. Yes, people will nitpick and say “not that bad”. But allowing the “other” side to identify and frame the incident means they get to say “not bad at all”.
That’s a useful insight. It’s so frustrating, also, to be dragged into the trenches to bitterly dispute the smallest things, over and over, and know that for every day it drags on, a certain percentage of additional people are going to decide they’re angry at you forever. It feels like this wasn’t always how the world worked, but that was probably youthful naivete…
But that sounds correct, that trying to avoid conflict is counterproductive if there’s someone who’s determined to pursue it.
I don’t mean to suggest ongoing engagement. Consider:
Alice says something bad happened in vague terms. Bob counters “here’s what really happened” with verifiable details. Bob is more credible.
Alice says something bad happened, but provides a fair bit of detail. Bob counters “you said this happened ‘early last year’ but it was actually July and that’s the second half”. This is the kind of petty disagreement I’ve seen a lot, and which I’m sure frustrates you. But this doesn’t require Alice to explain. From the outside, it’s apparent if Bob had a good argument, he wouldn’t focus on such small details. He is, if anything, adding credibility to Alice’s account.
This wasn’t always how the world worked, and it still isn’t how most of the world works. We can decide what kinds of communities we want to create and participate in.
I’ll go much further than that: I’ll happily ignore anyone who uses it non-ironically, as they are either arguing in bad faith or hopelessly ignorant of social issues.
Are you claiming that the cluster of positions doesn’t exist? Or that the term is a poor label for it? Or just that anyone using the term is likely to disagree with you?
Like many exonyms it’s used to label the “other” and implies some mix of disagreement and deliberate misunderstanding.
The term was originally an inside one, no?
Any term for a group is othering. I don’t see how SJW is qualitatively different from socialist, emo, fundamentalist, yuppie, quaker, millenial, or any number of terms we seem happy with.
((And all the proposed alternatives I’ve seen are too far from neutral. My dad objected to being called “Roman Catholic” - as far as he was concerned he was just “Christian” and his church was just “the Church”. But Protestants quite rightly refused to go along with that.))
No, I wasn’t there to see but I’ve been told it was never an inside term. Attempts to claim it do exist (“social justice rogue”, “social justice healer”), which if anything I take as confirmation nobody identified with it until it was imposed.
“Fundamentalist” was originally an endonym; “Quaker”, “yuppie” originally exonyms. I’m not sure about “socialist”, “emo”, or “millennial” (I suspect @lmm just invented “millenial”.) I don’t know where “SJW” came from for sure, but certainly the people I saw use it first were using it pejoratively.
I don’t think endonyms can plausibly be said to be inherently othering, although it depends on circumstances. I still wouldn’t dare to use “nigger”, and I’m still wary of “queer”.
“Millenial” is an exonym that has become understood by the group it references because of how many headlines it’s appeared in, I’m sorry to report. It’s really explicitly an exonym, because those articles are written very much for an audience who identifies as not-millenial, and wants to hear about how the kids these days are on the wrong lawns and so on.
“millenial” was a typo yeah. I blame my phone.
They were just a bunch of group labels that came to mind; most of them I have no idea myself whether endo- or exo-. It doesn’t seem to make much difference though, at least as far as I can see. (Indeed I can’t tell which you’re saying “nigger” is).
I thought maybe you meant people who drove the Mazda car.
Oh - I belatedly realized there was a spelling issue. :)
I’d say that exonyms are almost always for the purpose of othering, but that whether it’s harmful to use the term is a separate question that depends on the power dynamic. If I spend a long time writing complaints about “multi-billionaires”, I don’t think it could be argued that I’m hurting anyone but myself.
Oh, I failed to answer your question. “Nigger” originated as an exonym (obviously) for African people and is now used almost exclusively by African-Americans, though not exactly endonymically, plus the occasional bigoted white person who uses it pejoratively.
Oh, maybe. I usually see “SJW and proud of it” as taunting or trying to reclaim it. Perhaps it works as an ingroup label, but less so when outsiders try to apply it.
If I needed a pejorative, I’d probably go with “cry baby” or perhaps “busybody”, something that attaches more to actions than political alignment. If I need a positive label, I’m not sure what I’d use. Perhaps “people”. I guess it depends on what I’m trying to say about them, or why they need to be identified.
It depends on what you think people mean by it.
In my experience, people who attempt to justify it will give one of two definitions: it’s either “people who are too strongly in support of social justice” (which is IMO a contradiction in terms) or “people whose pursuit of social justice is in bad faith or in fact works against it” (which is an exceedingly small group of people).
Regardless of how they try to define it, the way it’s actually used is almost always “anyone with more leftist tendencies than me”, irrespective of the point of reference (in my experience, typically right-wing at least as far as feminism and anti-racism go). Whether the group of people the stated definition applies to actually exists is beside the point, because the set of people who may be labeled “SJW” is the overwhelming majority of people everywhere. Thus in terms of criticism of the term itself, I guess I would say it’s completely meaningless, and the person using it is revealing far more about themselves than whoever they’re trying to label.
Any attempt to draw a line on the political spectrum is vulnerable to the same criticism. There’s some truth to “anyone to the left of me is a socialist, anyone to the right of me is a fascist”. Or indeed to “we’re all Keynesians now”. But that doesn’t make the terms meaningless.
I guess I just haven’t seen any slipperiness of the term in practice. Even if there’s no formal definition, I think everyone means the same thing when they say “SJW”. I haven’t seen people getting confused and talking past each other. Nor have I seen anyone saying “I’m not an SJW, those guys are the SJWs” - I’ve seen people who objected to the term, or even claimed it was meaningless, but they always seemed to understand it perfectly.
There’s no attempt by anybody to make “SJW” into a “line on the political spectrum”. I’ve seen it applied to people all over the political spectrum, including some fairly hardcore conservatives who happened to make the mistake of expressing an insufficiently unsympathetic opinion. (As an example, m00t was declared an SJW when he kicked Gamergate off of 4chan because they were flooding it with material he considered off-topic or against the rules.)
And I know exactly what people mean when they say “SJW” (namely, “person expressing even slightly more sympathy or empathy than I do”). I don’t mean “meaningless” as in “poorly-defined”, rather as in “not useful”. In actual definition, it might as well be a synonym for “person”, which hardly needs more synonyms. The person using it has done little more than place themselves on the political spectrum (to the right of whoever they’re attempting to label) while making a very blatantly unjustified attempt to discredit their opponent.
Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, the biggest issue with the term is that it’s saying “you have the view you have just expressed” as if that’s a way of dismissing that view by proving it unimportant or something. :)
That is… much conciser than anything I’ve written so far, thanks. =)
My point is that by making this non-statement, people have only said anything about themselves, and it’s nothing that indicates they should be paid any attention.
No problem, haha, I’ve given it some thought. :) And yes, I agree.
Spectrum is a simplification, sure. Not everyone on the economic right is religious. Not every anarchist is on the left, or on the right. Localism draws from all over the political spectrum. Still these are positions with meaning.
I don’t know why you’re classifying moot as a hardcore conservative (well, I can guess maybe his views on gun legislation?). What I’ve read of his has been pretty nuanced, Free speech isn’t a left-right thing, at least traditionally - the culture 4chan is most reminiscent of, at least for me, is that of a proto-Internet system belonging to Whole Earth, hardly a hardcore conservative group.
And his actions regarding Gamergate were an enormous departure from the preceding nine years of 4chan - to an outsider, banning a subject probably doesn’t sound like much, but it had literally never happened before, and the absence of rules like that was in many ways a defining characteristic of 4chan. Heck, moot explicitly compared Gamergate to Project Chanology - which was never even close to being banned. Banning Gamergate discussion was probably his biggest public political act; it’s absolutely fair to infer that he feels pretty strongly about it, and likely has similar views on other issues to other anti-Gamergate folk. Which is to say, SJWs.
Again, “conservative” or “socialist” is equally well just “person to my right or left that I want to discredit”, or indeed “you have the view that you have just expressed”.
Here’s a thing which is probably clearer: Linus did at some points call for people to be retroactively aborted, that means - wishing for their death. Obviously, he will never be able to get his wish (or even actually have a real desire), or hire someone to at least make sure that error is “corrected”.
Still, wishing someones elses death is a spitting insult across almost all cultures. It cuts to the very core of a personality (its existence and protection from harm). This is the nuke of insults. Wishing someone physical harm is at least the artillery. To anyone who has ever experienced physical harm, doubly so. It’s a well documented strategy of intimidation to never actually follow through any threats. Threats already work well without that.
The great thing about insults is that you can play the “but it’s just a joke” card as often as you want and leave insecurity at the other side. In a circle of friends, that works somewhat, in a public forum, it doesn’t. There is a reason why diplomats take every insult for face value: it’s the only way to provide clarity and stop the joking-game. If Linus wants to make a joke to another maintainer, he can still resort to the backchannel where these things can be clarified easier if needed.
Was he being literal, or just hyperbolic, theatrical, and angry? I suspect the latter. It certainly doesn’t sound like a joke - more like an over-the-top expression of frustration. People may reasonably disagree with this as an expression of culture, but it seems like enough of a consensus has formed that this is the culture of Linux kernel development, for better or worse.
Does that make a difference? It causes the same damage no matter whether he meant to or not.
If someone is upset by it, they should probably seek clarification from the person who said the thing that they were upset by. If it wasn’t personal or literal, how could someone be bothered by it? Especially an experienced LK contributor who knows how rough-and-tumble that culture gets?
(That being said, I’m not part of the LK culture so I’m not going to claim the right to prescribe how things should go there. That’s for the group members to decide, based on their status and weight within the group.)
It’s really not about individuals being offended or not; it’s about the effect it has. Especially when it’s the founder of a community who speaks like this, it sends a strong message about what behavior is tolerated in that community.
I do agree that people outside that community don’t get to decide what happens in it. But nobody’s trying to do that - people are leaving, and apparently starting their own efforts which they intend to run differently.
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Let me be clearer: Offense is the wrong metric. Who is offended and how much, has nothing to do with what is wrong here.
I don’t think I expressed any view that was even an argument at all, let alone on anyone’s behalf - my own or anyone else’s.
I’m baffled by this question at several levels.
Pro-Choice advocates will tell you a fetus is not a human. Thus he didn’t wish their death. It’s more like he wished they’d never existed.