Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Dan Harkins <[e-mail]>]

On 8/7/20 7:21 AM, Richard Barnes wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:30 AM Dan Harkins <[e-mail] 
> <mailto:[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.
>
>
>
>