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This looks like a basic hit job on Jeremy 🧐
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NumFOCUS found I violated their Code of Conduct (CoC) at JupyterCon because my talk was not ā€œkindā€, because I said @joelgrus was ā€œwrongā€. This sets a bad precedent. Joel was not involved in NumFOCUS’s action, was not told about it, and did not support it fast.ai/2020/10/28/cod
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Looks like they walked it back as a procedural error, but the damage is done. Personally, I am onboard with the *objectives* of CoCs, but skeptical of them as a *mechanism*. They’re just too vulnerable to abuse and incompetence (latter appears to be the case here)
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Public Apology to Jeremy Howard: numfocus.org/blog/jeremy-ho
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People should use words like ā€œincompetenceā€ or ā€œapathyā€ or ā€œwe’re stupidā€ in apologies like this. If you deny malice, you must accept stupidity. Otherwise it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for unaccountable bureaucrats who were just spectators of miraculous errors without errants.
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This is one of the secondary reasons I suggested winding down refactor camp in 2019 if we couldn’t find a way to decentralize/virtualize it for bureaucratic abuse resistance (weirdly Covid-friendly call as well).
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While we had no problems in the years we ran it, the creeping expectations of CoC burdens etc made it increasingly taxing to run. I’m glad we quit on a high note without any serious issues in the 7-year run. It likely won’t be resurrected (though not for this reason).
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In the experiment we’re trying to make decentralized structure and 1:1 trust do almost all the heavy lift work of ensuring a safe environment. There are no CoC compliance bureaucrat roles. The CoC is mostly ā€œdon’t make us make a rule for this.ā€
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2x2: attacker org vs target org. Both ranging from centralized to decentralized. I think right-wing malice manifests like nerve gas in the subway (centralized attack on decentralized target), while wokewashed malice is more like a nuclear attack. Centralized on centralized.
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Decentralized on decentralized is stochastic terrorism and decentralized on centralized is basic guerrilla warfare. Both have social attack analogs.
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Malicious abuse is unfortunately more common these days in CoC type situations than stupidity. So we invert Hanlon’s razor these days and assume malice until incompetence is proven. Abuse cases seem to exceed use cases of dealing with legit complaints.
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An unaccountable, central bureaucracy with fiat power over an opaque procedural domain that is existentially critical to the org... yeah it’s a recipe for adverse selection of autocrats. Never yet met someone who was eager to ā€œserveā€ on such bodies who wasn’t also eager to rule.
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Well-intentioned person: ā€œWe need a Code of Conduct...ā€ Wannabe dictator: ā€œI... can... have... authoritah?ā€
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Problem is, a CoC is in no man’s land. Somewhere between a random busybody opinion written up into rules and a heavyweight constitution developed with a lot of expensive and time-consuming deliberation and a system of courts and a tradition of jurisprudence to steward it.
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