Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dan,

I'll just call out a couple points here:

1. The sentiment I'm expressing here is not based on the hypothetical
offense of some abstract, otherized group.  I am articulating actual
feedback from actual people -- doing actual good work at IETF -- who are
seriously questioning whether to just give up on the IETF as a result of
this thread.  One person's "offense-by-proxy" is another person's "standing
up for the little guy".

2. If you think that by virtue of being a white, American, male, long-time
IETF participant, you are not in an in-group for this list, you are
incredibly blind to your privilege.

3. You keep demanding evidence, even after several people have agreed there
is a problem here.  There's a word for this style of debate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

--RLB



On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 12:15 PM Dan Harkins <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> On 8/7/20 7:21 AM, Richard Barnes wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:30 AM Dan Harkins <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 8/1/20 4:05 PM, Richard Barnes wrote:
>>
>> The whole point of the draft and statement that kicked off this thread is
>> that people hurt each other without intending to.  That is, the point here
>> is not the "professional wounded person", it's the "wounded professional
>> person", who has to deal with an elevated ambient shittiness level just
>> because of things that are ingrained in the way things work -- and things
>> that are invisible to a lot of folks because of that ingrainedness.  This
>> work is about surfacing those ingrained things, in hopes of reducing the
>> ambient shittiness level for the folks it matters to.
>>
>>
>>   One of the problems of the day is that people forget the Law of
>> Unintended
>> Consequences. They think that the good intentions of the people who want
>> to enact some policy will ensure it will result in exactly what is
>> intended.
>>
>
> Literally the first sentence of my message is about people causing harm
> without intending to.
>
>
>   Yea. There's a difference between someone not making a connection
> between some action and some result ("causing harm without intending
> to") and  someone initiating a plan of action with the expressed goal
> of effecting some result but ending up with some completely different
> unplanned result.
>
>   I'm suggesting that you're in the latter category. You have some
> goal in mind-- more participation from certain segments of society--
> and you feel you will get to that goal by reducing what you refer to
> as the shittiness of certain speech.
>
>
> If I'm going to be generous, I'll admit that in some idealized sense,
> there are risks in both directions here -- restricting useful speech on the
> one hand, alienating contributors who could do good work on the other
> hand.
>
>
>   Thanks for being generous!
>
> But this thread itself is a testament to how free the in-group here feels
> to express their opinions, and I've had several people outside that group
> tell me how this toxic conversation is actively discouraging their
> participation in IETF.  Call them "professionally wounded" or "snowflakes"
> if you want, but the road this leads down is toward a senescent,
> obsolescent, irrelevant IETF.  People have better things to do with their
> time than engage with an organization that doesn't care about them.
>
>
>   Unsurprisingly, my perspective is the opposite of yours. I feel that I
> am definitely not in the "in group" having been accused of causing harm
> with
> my wrong think, crossing "red lines", and being on the receiving end of
> social pressure to conform with "in group" thought.
>
>   I too have been contacted by people, both those who are with me in the
> "out group" and those from the "in group" who wish to apply added pressure
> on me to conform. Those applying pressure to conform repeated your
> assertion that reading a word in an RFC will result in people becoming
> emotionally harmed and becoming alienated and potentially not wishing to
> take part in IETF processes. That assertion was never justified, it was
> just stated more forcefully and in a more accusatory fashion (accusing
> me of more bad think).
>
>   The interesting thing is that in my off-list chats with the "in group" I
> was told that the harm is to segments of society by people who these "in
> group" members clearly were not part of. For example, there was a reference
> made by a white cis male to harm caused by statements made in the TERF
> wars.
>
>   So I did not use the words "professionally wounded" or "snowflakes" but
> I have come up with another term: offense-by-proxy.
>
>
> In other words, the pure focus on one side of the risk equation is causing
> the consequence -- unintended or not -- of driving away new participants.
> Which implies to me that we should let up on that and take into account the
> effects we have on other people -- unintended or not.
>
>
>   You are making an assertion (namely, certain words are "driving away new
> participants") that I do not accept. If you want to restrict speech then
> you have to do a bit more than make a simple assertion.
>
>   By all means, let's take into account the effects we have on each other
> but how about we refrain from projecting offense on behalf of other groups.
> The practice of offense-by-proxy is somewhat offensive itself, unintended
> or not, because it assumes a behavior of the imagined victim group that the
> accuser's group does not take part in. It otherizes and that's offensive.
>
>   Dan.
>
> --Richard
>
>
>
>>
>>   That never happens.
>>
>>   If we allow the listener to decide whether the speaker's words are
>> shitty
>> (and that their ambient shittiness needs to be reduced-- I know what you
>> mean here in your impreciseness and I would appreciate it if you were to
>> say it explicitly) we will further empower victimhood. People will have an
>> incentive to claim they are wounded in order to alter the balance of power
>> in a discussion, and if people can be expected to do anything we know they
>> can be expected to respond to incentives. Nothing good will come of that,
>> in spite of the good intentions of its proponents.
>>
>>   Dan.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>