Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 12:43:35PM -0400, Richard Barnes wrote:

> So like I said in my very first message to this thread, if this discussion
> could be had from a place of empathy for our fellow contributors here, I
> think we would make a lot more progress.

Empathy is an excellent guide in personal relationships, and should not
be neglected in broader social contexts, and yet there is both much
truth in:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law

and opportunity to downplay injustice.  In the current context we're
better off dealing with each case on its merits, than litigating overly
broad prescriptions.

Authors already have plenty of incentives to avoid controversial
language, there's no need to explicitly enshrine specific taboos, such
lists are always both too broad and too narrow.  Let each document be
reviewed on the merits.  We'll pretty much get the same outcome, without
the exclusionary over-policing.

> For me where the "toxic" line is crossed is when folks start to invalidate
> the experiences of others.  We've seen this in other venues, notably in the
> RFC series discussion.

The expeperience of a single person is anecdote, it is not
"invalidating" to suggest that such anecdotes need to be balanced
against the potential harms of over-correcting.  It is not possible to
avoid all possible misunderstandings and someone taking offense.  We are
not denying the offense when we choose to not institute (often
ultimately futile) preemptive measures.

> A newcomer says "This is hard for me" or "This doesn't meet my needs"
> and hears back "It's not hard" or "It meets my needs just fine".

Only in a dystopia can there be uniform justice, when almost all are
equally oppressed (except for those doling out said equal justice).

We need to be careful to not strive for that outcome.  We can expect
authors to avoid inflamatory language, and to generally avoid colourful
metaphors that might be misconstrued.

To transgress for a moment, to make a more emphatic point, none of that
requires a blacklist of verbotten words or phrases, slavishly followed
by all authors, lest they be sentenced to exile for reeducation.  The
anecdotes presented to support the proposed policies don't look
sufficient to justify a remedy, the harms of policing an explicit list
of taboos look greater on balance.

> Here, some folks are saying "This sort of language makes it harder for
> me to participate" and some messages in this thread are saying back
> "This isn't a concern".

No, they're saying that the concern has not been credibly demonstrated
to be sufficient to warrant the proposed remedy, and perhaps that the
"harder" != "too hard", and that "too hard" is neither demonstrated nor
perhaps even plausible.  There is no perfect justice, only perfect
tyranny.

-- 
    Viktor.