> Overloading the discussion of the bylaws change (47 out of 177 posts in topic at the time the moderators closed the topic), which created an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which encouraged increasingly emotional responses from other community members. The later result of the vote showed 81% support for the most controversial of the bylaws changes, which demonstrates the controversy was blown out of proportion.
He seemed to be pointing out risks of giving quite that additional power to a board, including the risk of it being abused to neutralize opposition -- only to have the existing power appear to be used to neutralize him.
I hope this aspect won't be lost in discussion. Knowing online forums of modern Internet, I fully expect some of the keywords in later-listed reasons given for suspending Tim Peters to trigger big upvoted threads, with the effect of burying discussion of the first-listed reason. As, for example, the current top-voted thread on HN as I type this.
Someone points out new rules make it too easy to cancel people over nothing, gets cancelled, seemingly, over this compliant (no idea about everything else).
It's literally a catch-22.
EDIT on further reading, while I agree with the arguments made by Tim Peters, I think he misread the room perhaps. It's clear the people he's talking to don't understand his hypothetical objections, and just won't change their mind. At the point where they start to take his (reasonable) objections personally, it does turn into a bit of a polite food fight.
At some point, I think you cut your losses, if arguing for the right thing does more damage than the wrong thing itself. As is, he's out, presumably the proposal will pass, just without him in board. He could have cut his losses and maybe resigned.
But easier said than done, arguing with people online about things you care about is hard.
Yeah, I didn't read the entire thing (it was torturing my just-waking brain), but I did notice a shift at one point, when he seemed to be trying to defend some well-known fundamental, which IMHO ideally wouldn't need defense nor explanation in context of a bylaws discussion.
I suppose, even to very seasoned operators, sometimes it's hard to know when is time for patient and diplomatic explanation, when is time to get worried and make more passionate argument, when is time it's time to shift to "commit" mode, and when it's time to resign with the right decorum so that you still look like a sophisticated team player to future opportunities.
I also suppose it's easier if the first priority is to be an operator.
As for the other key party, besides whatever else is going on, publicly suspending someone in the tech industry like this seems like a big deal, and can damage the career of even the most accomplished people. It had really better be necessary and appropriate, or you're looking at damage to your org reputation and your culture, and maybe legal liability.
I read most of it,twice. I almost agreed with Peter's after the first skim, but on reading the second time, I do think use a lot of rethorical stratagems/fallacies (he isn't the only one but the fact that he posted a lot does not help, and the use of the 'slippery slope' argument in like his 3rd post is a killer) so i now tend to distrust his good faith. The 'arguments' he use are fairly anecdotal, and now I think he's mostly wrong and a touch too adversarial. I think the Bennet guy made far better arguments (and that's frm someone who don't know/think anything about the overall situation).
Overall, I don't think Tim Peters is a bad guy (tm), I think he has been mischaracterized/misunderstood, but his position was mostly wrong and he was a bit too active, which made him seem adversarial/trollish, which did not help. Also, clearly bad faith arguments are cheap and makes me dislike you when I fell for it (which I did).
Banning for that is a bit much, but I understand my sensitivity is not the rule (but it should be :)).
P.S: Re-reading that made me feel like I'm part of the 'lesswrong' community. I'm not, but I see why checking the use of rethorical fallacies is useful.
Ironically, that chain of thinking might be a case of the argument-from-fallacy fallacy. Just because someone is seems to be good at rhetoric and makes some bad arguments doesn't mean they are arguing from a bad faith position, or even imply that their position is unsupported.
>>He seemed to be pointing out risks of giving quite that additional power to a board, including the risk of it being abused to neutralize opposition -- only to have the existing power appear to be used to neutralize him.
I mean even though the board is not traditionally a boss in the sense of an open source project. But its still a kind of management/boss.
One of the most cornerstone laws of power is to never criticise a team member, even less so one's own boss(es) or their policies in public. Another law is to never make a team member apologise to you. It simply creates a rivalry on the longer run, and new enemies you don't want to fight. In fact you are better of not doing such things in gossip too. Powers always maintain spies, or just plain allies who give them information in return for favours. If you want to walk down this path, do ensure you have enough(minimum) support from a majority section of similar powers, then act. But even this is not recommended.
In this case whenever such policies are announced in public, these decisions have been made with enough support and votes, the announcement is just a public event of informing the larger masses. If you criticise these things in public, you won't change a thing. Instead the powers mark you up for elimination at the first chance. Like in this case.
If I was this person, I would abandon the project(not just the 3 month suspension) and probably convince other team members to do the same. Python is not the only decent open source game in town.
Its also pointless to contribute to a project whose sole purpose is to hurt the very people that make it happen.
> If I was this person, I would abandon the project(not just the 3 month suspension)
I would like to strongly urge you to research the story of Stefan Krah, another core developer who left in 2020. After receiving a 3 month suspension. Whom Mr. Peters spoke favourably of at the time, and who might credibly also be suspected of being neurodivergent in some manner.
> Steering Council member Gregory P Smith: "If a conduct-related enforcement action happens and that 'ruins their career', the responsibility for that lies entirely on them. It was their behavior that got them there in the first place."
It's concerning just how strong the "just world" fallacy is with so many people, to the point of not being able to comprehend the argument that Good Thing (tm) could ever cause harm
> "Defending 'reverse racism' and 'reverse sexism', concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment."
Sorry do they need a scientific paper to confirm that it's possible to be racist to a "majority"? And the Kafkaesque idea that it's "exclusionary" to oppose it, even as a theoretical thing
Something that came into my mind while reading your comment: There is a link between the "just world fallacy" and "creating an exclusionary environment". The just world fallacy is a mis-thought to justify CoC abuse. Abusing the CoC against people is going to hit marginalized people most - if there are accusations against a person, they are more likely agreed with when the targeted person is one of the odd/weirdo people in the community.
This is how how marginalization works in practice.
> Sorry do they need a scientific paper to confirm that it's possible to be racist to a "majority"?
There are different definitions and views of racism. And one dominating in certain circles says that it's impossible that a weak minority can be racist against a strong majority. This then comes down to in those group's popular claim that there is no racism against white people, because white people are the dominating group on this planet.
I actually agree with them here. Under the original definition the Russians used when they invented the word no you can't be "racist" against a majority. You can be bigoted but racist means something more along the lines of maintaining civilization in the form it's in and excluding people who either don't fit in well or aren't typically involved.
> I recognize that there are some who think that way. It makes me sad. But that attitude as phrased is entirely backwards. If a conduct related enforcement action happens and that “ruins their career”, the responsibility for that lies entirely on them. It was their behavior that got them there in the first place.
That seems obviously incorrect. The outcome is a combination of their behavior, the text of the CoC, and the subjective interpretation of the CoC and the behavior (by the people doing the enforcement). Any of these could be "wrong".
I gather that the person making this comment was one of the people doing the enforcement. Obviously they'd think that in any specific case, the CoC was reasonable and their reading of it and their interpretation of the behavior was correct. If they didn't think that, they would have reached a different outcome.
But this isn't a statement about a specific case. It's a statement about generalities. And it's pretty disturbing that the people running the show refuse to acknowledge the possibility of errors even on a theoretical level.
True. Reminds me of some negative interactions on Stack Overflow when your post is rewritten making your question into a different question. What are the reasons— it reads better for the community; you don’t know what you’re asking.
> mechanism to remove them – if they've been found to have violated the CoC – is seeking a vote from the full Python Community. This is undesirable, because it would "subject members of the community – including people directly impacted by that violator's behavior – to undue distress.
So... down with voting, up with secret police? Wouldn't want to stress the commoners with the power of a vote.
I've seen an increasing number of projects with seemingly questionable Codes of Conduct or other similar guidelines. As an example, a few years ago I was interested in trying my hand at contributing to a FOSS project, and found P5.js which matched my interests. However, the contributor docs [1] mentioned:
> At the 2019 Contributors Conference, p5.js made the commitment to only add new features that increase access (inclusion and accessibility). We will not accept feature requests that don’t support these efforts.
I completely support these efforts, but it turned me off the project. It seems a bit too strict to just refuse any PRs that cannot be considered as increasing access by some measures. I even tried looking for the proceedings of the mentioned conference to get more context, but didn't find anything conclusive. It seemed like an arbitrary decision, made outside public oversight.
It might be the case that these policies aren't enforced seriously, but at that time I decided that I didn't want to risk working on something for potentially months that I found cool but couldn't present as "increasing access". So, I just went ahead and played around with OpenGL instead.
Gregory P. Smith writes: “If a conduct-related enforcement action happens and that ‘ruins their career,’ the responsibility for that lies entirely on them. It was their behavior that got them there in the first place.” That puts far too much faith in the process, assuming that the Python Steering Council (of which he is a member) will never get something wrong.
‘Enforcement actions’ (what a bureaucratic way to refer to punishment!) do not just ‘happen’: they are imposed by people. They may be just or unjust; the people may be fair or biased; the process may be due or undue.
Mr. Smith should reflect on the fact that his name is indelibly associated with this action, and consider that if others happen to think ill of his actions and remarks in this affair then the responsibility for that lies entirely with him: it is his behaviour he may be judged for.
python-dev is a repressive organization run by those who put themselves up for election and get 30 out of 90 votes.
Inexplicably, the elected "leaders" also have/had positions at Google, Microsoft, RedHat and Bloomberg (the Googlers may have been fired this year).
The council prosecutes those who contradict the hierarchy and have an own opinion. Tim Peters has contradicted the council on many occasions. The council is unable to summarize even simple mail conversations, disregards historical context, applies the CoC selectively and does not shy away from defamation.
The council censors and does not let the accused defend themselves.
Tim Peters is the good guy here. Intelligent, non-threatening and easy to deal with. Like in the Soviet Union, these qualities make him a threat to the system.
This is open source. The traditional remedy to some disagreement over project managemeng is to fork. If everyone agrees the fork wins, if the CoC people are in the right the fork dies. The great thing about free software is you can vote with your feet when it comes to management issues.
> if the CoC people are in the right the fork dies.
I would disagree with that part. Forks are highly difficult. OpenBSD succeeded, so did the gcc fork that was sponsored by Cygwin but then merged back into mainline gcc. Otherwise?
Then, the council owns the entire marketing organization PSF, which owns the conferences, which means undesirables can and will be deplatformed.
It is much much harder to do a successful fork in 2024 than it was in 2005. Open source is corporate now, and the employees will stick with the official version and not the fork.
I think you could literally write an XPython fork that is 2 times faster, has a 100% compatibility but would still be marketed out of existence.
If Python had a free standard, it might be possible. But that will not happen.
Yes it is that simple and it’s also not. You need financial muscle behind the fork. E.g deno vs node, valkey vs redis, etc.
The discussion got heated but I think Tim Peters is arguing for a more stringent suspension rule as opposed to a simple majority vote. CoC violations are serious and should be debated better than just setting up a vote. The debate should be publicly discussed and the findings and reasons published as well.
Before Timsort, I knew of Tim some 20 years ago from the ranking and online forum of SPOJ[1], a Polish competitive programming website where he always seemed to top the speed leaderboards with unorthodox usage of Python.
He's exceptionally talented and original, and that sort of nonsense doesn't go well with a bureaucracy.
Not all, but some exceptionally talented people might be hard to work with as well, so that anecdote doesn't give much information---you may well have claimed such observation as a generality and argued in the other way.
You're right, generalizations are difficult, and I can't give a second hand summary of how the younger me perceived Tim's posts. One thing I remember is that he didn't give off the dogmatic stubbornness or indifference to the reasoning of others that seems to be correlated with the difficulty in working with smart people.
Readit News
> Overloading the discussion of the bylaws change (47 out of 177 posts in topic at the time the moderators closed the topic), which created an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which encouraged increasingly emotional responses from other community members. The later result of the vote showed 81% support for the most controversial of the bylaws changes, which demonstrates the controversy was blown out of proportion.
I skimmed much of "https://discuss.python.org/t/for-your-consideration-proposed...", and all the Tim Peters comments I saw so far reflected pretty well on him.
He seemed to be pointing out risks of giving quite that additional power to a board, including the risk of it being abused to neutralize opposition -- only to have the existing power appear to be used to neutralize him.
I hope this aspect won't be lost in discussion. Knowing online forums of modern Internet, I fully expect some of the keywords in later-listed reasons given for suspending Tim Peters to trigger big upvoted threads, with the effect of burying discussion of the first-listed reason. As, for example, the current top-voted thread on HN as I type this.
Someone points out new rules make it too easy to cancel people over nothing, gets cancelled, seemingly, over this compliant (no idea about everything else).
It's literally a catch-22.
EDIT on further reading, while I agree with the arguments made by Tim Peters, I think he misread the room perhaps. It's clear the people he's talking to don't understand his hypothetical objections, and just won't change their mind. At the point where they start to take his (reasonable) objections personally, it does turn into a bit of a polite food fight.
At some point, I think you cut your losses, if arguing for the right thing does more damage than the wrong thing itself. As is, he's out, presumably the proposal will pass, just without him in board. He could have cut his losses and maybe resigned.
But easier said than done, arguing with people online about things you care about is hard.
I suppose, even to very seasoned operators, sometimes it's hard to know when is time for patient and diplomatic explanation, when is time to get worried and make more passionate argument, when is time it's time to shift to "commit" mode, and when it's time to resign with the right decorum so that you still look like a sophisticated team player to future opportunities.
I also suppose it's easier if the first priority is to be an operator.
As for the other key party, besides whatever else is going on, publicly suspending someone in the tech industry like this seems like a big deal, and can damage the career of even the most accomplished people. It had really better be necessary and appropriate, or you're looking at damage to your org reputation and your culture, and maybe legal liability.
I read most of it,twice. I almost agreed with Peter's after the first skim, but on reading the second time, I do think use a lot of rethorical stratagems/fallacies (he isn't the only one but the fact that he posted a lot does not help, and the use of the 'slippery slope' argument in like his 3rd post is a killer) so i now tend to distrust his good faith. The 'arguments' he use are fairly anecdotal, and now I think he's mostly wrong and a touch too adversarial. I think the Bennet guy made far better arguments (and that's frm someone who don't know/think anything about the overall situation).
Overall, I don't think Tim Peters is a bad guy (tm), I think he has been mischaracterized/misunderstood, but his position was mostly wrong and he was a bit too active, which made him seem adversarial/trollish, which did not help. Also, clearly bad faith arguments are cheap and makes me dislike you when I fell for it (which I did).
Banning for that is a bit much, but I understand my sensitivity is not the rule (but it should be :)).
P.S: Re-reading that made me feel like I'm part of the 'lesswrong' community. I'm not, but I see why checking the use of rethorical fallacies is useful.
I mean even though the board is not traditionally a boss in the sense of an open source project. But its still a kind of management/boss.
One of the most cornerstone laws of power is to never criticise a team member, even less so one's own boss(es) or their policies in public. Another law is to never make a team member apologise to you. It simply creates a rivalry on the longer run, and new enemies you don't want to fight. In fact you are better of not doing such things in gossip too. Powers always maintain spies, or just plain allies who give them information in return for favours. If you want to walk down this path, do ensure you have enough(minimum) support from a majority section of similar powers, then act. But even this is not recommended.
In this case whenever such policies are announced in public, these decisions have been made with enough support and votes, the announcement is just a public event of informing the larger masses. If you criticise these things in public, you won't change a thing. Instead the powers mark you up for elimination at the first chance. Like in this case.
If I was this person, I would abandon the project(not just the 3 month suspension) and probably convince other team members to do the same. Python is not the only decent open source game in town.
Its also pointless to contribute to a project whose sole purpose is to hurt the very people that make it happen.
I would like to strongly urge you to research the story of Stefan Krah, another core developer who left in 2020. After receiving a 3 month suspension. Whom Mr. Peters spoke favourably of at the time, and who might credibly also be suspected of being neurodivergent in some manner.
History rhymes quite impressively at times.
Deleted Comment
It's concerning just how strong the "just world" fallacy is with so many people, to the point of not being able to comprehend the argument that Good Thing (tm) could ever cause harm
> "Defending 'reverse racism' and 'reverse sexism', concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment."
Sorry do they need a scientific paper to confirm that it's possible to be racist to a "majority"? And the Kafkaesque idea that it's "exclusionary" to oppose it, even as a theoretical thing
This is how how marginalization works in practice.
There are different definitions and views of racism. And one dominating in certain circles says that it's impossible that a weak minority can be racist against a strong majority. This then comes down to in those group's popular claim that there is no racism against white people, because white people are the dominating group on this planet.
Dead Comment
That seems obviously incorrect. The outcome is a combination of their behavior, the text of the CoC, and the subjective interpretation of the CoC and the behavior (by the people doing the enforcement). Any of these could be "wrong".
I gather that the person making this comment was one of the people doing the enforcement. Obviously they'd think that in any specific case, the CoC was reasonable and their reading of it and their interpretation of the behavior was correct. If they didn't think that, they would have reached a different outcome.
But this isn't a statement about a specific case. It's a statement about generalities. And it's pretty disturbing that the people running the show refuse to acknowledge the possibility of errors even on a theoretical level.
So... down with voting, up with secret police? Wouldn't want to stress the commoners with the power of a vote.
> At the 2019 Contributors Conference, p5.js made the commitment to only add new features that increase access (inclusion and accessibility). We will not accept feature requests that don’t support these efforts.
I completely support these efforts, but it turned me off the project. It seems a bit too strict to just refuse any PRs that cannot be considered as increasing access by some measures. I even tried looking for the proceedings of the mentioned conference to get more context, but didn't find anything conclusive. It seemed like an arbitrary decision, made outside public oversight.
It might be the case that these policies aren't enforced seriously, but at that time I decided that I didn't want to risk working on something for potentially months that I found cool but couldn't present as "increasing access". So, I just went ahead and played around with OpenGL instead.
[1]: https://p5js.org/contribute/access/
‘Enforcement actions’ (what a bureaucratic way to refer to punishment!) do not just ‘happen’: they are imposed by people. They may be just or unjust; the people may be fair or biased; the process may be due or undue.
Mr. Smith should reflect on the fact that his name is indelibly associated with this action, and consider that if others happen to think ill of his actions and remarks in this affair then the responsibility for that lies entirely with him: it is his behaviour he may be judged for.
Inexplicably, the elected "leaders" also have/had positions at Google, Microsoft, RedHat and Bloomberg (the Googlers may have been fired this year).
The council prosecutes those who contradict the hierarchy and have an own opinion. Tim Peters has contradicted the council on many occasions. The council is unable to summarize even simple mail conversations, disregards historical context, applies the CoC selectively and does not shy away from defamation.
The council censors and does not let the accused defend themselves.
Tim Peters is the good guy here. Intelligent, non-threatening and easy to deal with. Like in the Soviet Union, these qualities make him a threat to the system.
I would disagree with that part. Forks are highly difficult. OpenBSD succeeded, so did the gcc fork that was sponsored by Cygwin but then merged back into mainline gcc. Otherwise?
Then, the council owns the entire marketing organization PSF, which owns the conferences, which means undesirables can and will be deplatformed.
It is much much harder to do a successful fork in 2024 than it was in 2005. Open source is corporate now, and the employees will stick with the official version and not the fork.
I think you could literally write an XPython fork that is 2 times faster, has a 100% compatibility but would still be marketed out of existence.
If Python had a free standard, it might be possible. But that will not happen.
The discussion got heated but I think Tim Peters is arguing for a more stringent suspension rule as opposed to a simple majority vote. CoC violations are serious and should be debated better than just setting up a vote. The debate should be publicly discussed and the findings and reasons published as well.
Why is there opposition to that?
He's exceptionally talented and original, and that sort of nonsense doesn't go well with a bureaucracy.
[1] https://spoj.com
Dead Comment