How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 6:41 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
In reply to: How to do Samba: Nicely by excors
Parent article: How to do Samba: Nicely

> And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself."

I never liked that one as a rule. I would never treat people as badly as I treat myself.

> And as far as I can tell, there's nothing that clearly forbids e.g. homophobic behaviour, as long as you love them and pray for them while calling their lives sinful. That's not comforting to people who are thinking about joining the community and want some assurance they'll be accepted.

I wonder how ones sexual orientation would ever come up in the context of open source development, unless someone deliberately seeks conflict, which I would think is covered in another rule.

A CoC has to be understood more like a constitution than a penal code, it has to have some wiggle room to be effective (although I object to the word "unwelcome" in the Contributor Covenant).

I agree with you that this seems somewhat facetious, at least I had a good laugh. It mirrors that a lot of people don't really want to deal with it, especially since adopting a CoC seems to often trigger a slew of nasty responses (not here on LWN of course, but a few other places).

How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 11:52 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

>> And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself."
>
> I never liked that one as a rule. I would never treat people as badly as I treat myself.

Hmm, I suspect you may be misinterpreting that one - its archaic and ambiguous language is another problem. I believe it's meant to be a negative form of the Golden Rule, more clearly expressed like "Never do to anyone else anything that you would not want someone to do to you". (As in, "would not have done" should be interpreted as "do not wish to be done", rather than meaning something you did not (or will not) potentially do. I assume there are fancy grammatical terms for these things but I don't know them.)

So the rule does still restrict your behaviour if you're an autosadist; it just becomes useless and permits you to hurt others if you're a regular masochist. Presumably the medieval monks weren't heavily into BDSM else they'd have realised that people have different (sometimes complementary) tastes, and the rightness of an asymmetric action depends on all the participants being okay with it, and none can judge its rightness solely by considering their own desires. Surely someone has come up with a more robust rule in the past 2500 years that can be used instead of this.

(Anyway, per https://www.mail-archive.com/sqlite-users@mailinglists.sq... it looks like SQLite has now renamed its Code of Conduct to a Code of Ethics and changed the preamble again (compare http://web.archive.org/web/20180322103128/https://sqlite.... vs http://web.archive.org/web/20181024180502/https://sqlite.... vs https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html), and the CoC was changed to the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines which look okay. Now the problem is that the CoE arguably violates the CoC, because it still makes the developer group appear actively non-inclusive towards non-Christians.)

How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 14:45 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> So the rule does still restrict your behaviour if you're an autosadist; it just becomes useless and permits you to hurt others if you're a regular masochist. Presumably the medieval monks weren't heavily into BDSM else they'd have realised that people have different (sometimes complementary) tastes, and the rightness of an asymmetric action depends on all the participants being okay with it, and none can judge its rightness solely by considering their own desires. Surely someone has come up with a more robust rule in the past 2500 years that can be used instead of this.

Well, it doesn't work well for half the population, and is extremely sexist, anyway.

OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it! And then they treat me like a female and I hate that!

It's very hard to come up with a decent rule along those lines, but something along the lines of "encourage and build others up". But all this requires some basic knowledge of human psychology, and far too many people take the attitude "I don't WANT to know ..." :-(

Cheers,
Wol

How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 23:23 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it!

You are taking a very literal interpretation. I'm not suggesting it is wrong to be literal, but it is not the only reasonable interpretation.

How you want to be treated is a function of various aspects of who you are, in general (male, British, etc) in context (poor, rich, homeless) and at present (tired, grumpy, hungry).

There are multiple levels at which you can interpret the maxim, depending on how deeply you look into both yourself and the other person, and what level of abstraction you consider when you try to form an identity between the two.

You get to choose how abstract you go, but the maxim applies recursively: How abstractly would you like someone else to analyse your condition when determining the best way to compare their desires with yours - then use a similar level of abstraction yourself.

How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 26, 2018 16:42 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

The "negative version of the Golden Rule" was from Confucius, five centuries before the Biblical version. It's been translated as "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself."