Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

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.

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.
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.

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.

--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.
>
>
>
>
>