| 7 Nov 2021 |
 joepie91 🏳️🌈 | In reply to @tomberek:matrix.org
I’ll take “good-faith” off the table for a moment. At what point of bad-faith discussion spreading all over the community would you reconsider. my attempt at an answer: at the point where bad-faith discussion has become so unmanageable that the situation is not salvageable. some hypothetical cases of that could be:
- a majority of the regulars lose interest in conflict resolution and choose a 'war' instead (common in off-the-deep-end communities, but unlikely in NixOS)
- existing moderators and shepherds fail to step in if some people deliberately disrupt the discussion, allowing them to provoke others without end
- one of the shepherds or authors 'goes rogue' and starts disrupting the discussion with deliberate bad-faith arguments to push through the proposal
I personally consider all of these unlikely to happen in the NixOS community as it is today, though of course technically possible
| 12:36:00 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | of those three, 'moderators and shepherds failing to step in' has been my biggest concern, but the shepherd update that was posted yesterday(?) has alleviated that for me for the foreseeable future | 12:37:23 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | another more abstract way to phrase it would be: I would reconsider when the overall trend is people moving away from understanding each other, rather than towards it | 12:43:28 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | (which would be the consequence of bad-faith discussion becoming unmanageable since the point there is to drive people apart) | 12:44:05 |
 tomberek | “Disruption” has been used quite often over the last few months. This very RFC can easily be considered one and has clearly driven some people apart. The only thing distinguishing it is that it is in good-faith? | 12:44:51 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | to me, yes. | 12:45:37 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | it's specifically 'constructed disruption' that I have a problem with, which thankfully seems to be rare in this community | 12:45:58 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | * it's specifically 'constructed disruption' (the bad-faith thing) that I have a problem with, which thankfully seems to be rare in this community | 12:46:35 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I do include "is disruptive, has been asked not to do that, and continues to do it anyway" in that | 12:47:24 |
 Irenes | I mean... I don't think I agree with that characterization | 12:48:13 |
| Irenes | to me, disruption means an intent to divide people | 12:49:02 |
| Irenes | that is not what the RFC is trying to do, and I don't think it's even an accurate description of what's happening | 12:49:23 |
| Irenes | I agree that putting the RFC forward causes harm, in the sense that there are people who have said some pretty intense things that have caused harm, and I anticipated that there would be people doing that, and I don't think that, like... I don't think that moral culpability stops at the person who makes the proximate decision | 12:50:26 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I think tomberek is interpreting 'disruption' as meaning the event, not the action | 12:50:32 |
 Ellie | It's certainly brought to the surface some hitherto unseen thoughts | 12:50:33 |
| Irenes | like there is an argument that some people would make that anyone who is being intense with the goal of causing harm is responsible for their own decisions and nobody else is | 12:50:55 |
| Irenes | and I think that argument holds in many common situations but does not hold here | 12:51:07 |
| Irenes | I think I'm culpable for their actions because I anticipated that somebody would do it, and because inaction was a realistic possibility | 12:51:46 |
| tomberek | Or causing harm without intent. | 12:52:23 |
| Irenes | (and there's probably other factors, but this is a deep subject. what I'm trying to say is that this doesn't feel the same as blaming a person who's being blackmailed, to me.) | 12:52:24 |
| Irenes | yes, and I think the majority of the harm is without intent but not all of it | 12:52:37 |
| Irenes | I was just trying to avoid having to add more caveats by focusing on the part that's easiest to reason about | 12:53:01 |
| Irenes | I think something analogous could be said about the rest but it would be a lot wordier | 12:53:18 |
| Irenes | anyway, so there's two points I'm making. (1) disruption is not a fair way to describe the RFC; (2) this doesn't mean that I'm holding myself blameless | 12:54:40 |
| Irenes | I think this analysis is a very quirky thing, specific to me. I've been through uh.... several moral frameworks over the course of my life. | 12:55:44 |
| Irenes | I'd be surprised if joepie or ashkitten entirely agrees with it. | 12:55:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | I don't disagree, I just also always consider 'harm caused by inaction' in the equation | 12:56:56 |
| joepie91 🏳️🌈 | my life is, quite literally, a series of harm reduction tradeoff considerations | 12:57:19 |
| Irenes | sure, yeah, there's this concept of a "moral hazard" which holds that people who don't pull the lever in a trolley problem are never culpable, but people who do, are. | 12:57:41 |
| Irenes | and I don't buy that concept at all. | 12:57:48 |
