Plausibly Deniable

If all this is to be taken at face value, Kenneth Reitz should be publicly removed from any and all projects. The reported activity (of having secret groups to “work around” the troublesome person) is untenable. Projects should not be afraid to exclude people who are more trouble than they are worth; feeling that one cannot ever exclude people is also known as “Geek social fallacy #1”: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

> We need to be willing to explore the assumptions, known or unknown, that we carry with us when we create software. Hear, hear. I have two other longstanding favorite examinations-of-assumptions pieces: "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"[0], and "Five Geek Social Fallacies"[1] [0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab… [1] http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

How are any of these activities improved by an abrasive culture? The only thing it creates, ultimately, is the endgame of the Geek Social Fallacies: a place where the only people left all have nasty personalities and no social connections to any other kinds of people. http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html If you haven't been in an environment where everybody is tolerated -- you're really missing out. I've been lucky enough to work on projects where programming nerds mingle with visual artists, mechanics, hardware hackers, fashionistas, musicians, and more, and it's amazing. And furthermore, it's not like we're watching what we say all day. In my experience, if you have a baseline where everyone knows they are accepted and have recourse to call someone out, then there's lots of "inappropriate" humor.

Hmm, well if you're looking for more comparative analysis type stuff, usually a good starting point is the classic Five Geek Social Fallacies: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html Also, if you follow the rabbit hole of what geeks think about the term "creepy", you start to find all sorts of stuff. The Captain Awkward blog is a good resource for that.

There's a certain amount of overhead and risk in that. What if I "friend" someone from work and forget to file them in the right group on Facebook? Whereas I know that there are things I would simply never ever say in my LinkedIn status, let alone post those photos... One profile to rule them all sounds great, but read ths http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

The premise of the post I replied to is that the mailing list moderation is currently not great and that it allows people to be abusive. It suggest that we should crowdsource this moderation. I assume they think this will lower the burden. I myself do not think that this is the actual problem. I think the actual problem is that many FOSS communities have fostered an idea that cracking down on certain types of behavior is censorship. Of course they might all agree to ban somebody who is saying certain well known explicit words or being really really aggressive, but there's a lot of behavior that I would consider bannable but they do not. I'm trying to avoid mentioning specific cases because I don't wanna either reopen old wounds or cause another similar dustup. I can say that it reminds me a lot of the really old post about the 5 geek social fallacies https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/ In particular social fallacy #1 Obviously we're not talking about geek culture here (in general anyways). After rereading it, I saw something else that we actually do a see a lot even today. This in particular has happened on many a mailing list, including the ones I'm not specifically mentioning >> <SNIP> when nothing smacking of social selectiveness can be discussed in public, people inevitably begin to organize activities in secret. </SNIP> Well-known annoyances get tolerated for years, and the people who do the work start moving their discussions to bug…

Honestly, do you want a BigCo job? Would it make you happy? The experience of being a tiny cog in an unthinkingly vast machine is more alienating than you might think, even if you like the money. I think lots of those who stay on long-term in that environment, say >3-4 years, effectively become institutionalised, condemned to spend the rest of their life philosophising about whether they can ever be L8 material. These are people who are, by and large, smart but not wise. Yes, the money is good, for an employee, but it barely equals what even a small business owner could make - and these are people whose smarts would allow them to thrive in the software niche, at least with a minimal amount of commercial nous. The truth is that FAANG (or FAAG, considering what's going on at Netflix?) keeps these people there by creating a value system. If you've ever read the internet-classic 'Five Geek Social Fallacies' post (https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/), you'll know that people like us - frankly - are suckers for taxonomy. If you tell them that they are the best because they work for you, and the only thing that can make them any better as an engineer is creating maximum returns for the Borg, and surround them with others who mirror and validate that behaviour, they will fall for it for the rest of their lives. Don't fall for it. There are a fuck ton of smart people at FAANG companies – that's one of the few marketing points which is unvitiated in its merit,…

I suspect it looks cheap simply because culture has changed in the 16 years since this was published. Remember that in 2003, the only way you're going to be reading an essay online is if you're devoting the time to sit down at a desktop to do so. Do you feel your criticism would still apply with the same force if it was clear that the author was considered to be a geek by himself and others? *Edited to add a quote from http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html regarding this point: > First up is the issue of what "geek" means. It's an ill- > defined subculture at the best of times, but I generally > see two loose and overlapping superfamilies. On the one > hand, those geeks whose common denominator is a passion > for technical pursuits of all sorts -- OS geeks, coding > geeks, sysadmin geeks, etc.; on the other, those whose > common denominator is a passion for media -- comic book > geeks, film geeks, anime geeks, gaming geeks, etc. I'm a > game designer with a degree in performance studies. You > can probably guess where I fall. I wasn't thinking espe- > cially rigorously when I wrote 5GSF (or, for that matter, > Why Geeks Like Anime), so while I defined my terms, I > used the media-geek definition throughout. This caused > problems for some readers coming from the other side of > the tracks -- like, say, Metafilter.

I used to really believe this too, but I stumbled across the "Five Geek Social Fallacies" and it really helped me understand why I was so apprehensive to exclude others. Some people just don't mesh well, and trying to force it will just ruin the entire vibe. You don't have to throw all your volatile or otherwise abrasive friends to the side, but it's important to understand that some friends are better one-on-one as opposed to group gatherings (especially with people who aren't familiar with their quirks). Trying to force it just makes everyone miserable. [1] https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

Really? Back in my day, there were all sorts of nerd groups, which were often plagued with horrible social dysfunction.[0] People just muddled through. [0] https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/

However, are "your people" actually transitively closed? My impression is this isn't really the case for most people (or at least not if you like to talk about more than one thing). I'm reminded of this article I saw several years ago https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/ which suggests that we shouldn't assume friendship is transitive. I know I have friends whom I would never want to introduce to one another or have in the same conversation or social gathering! I agree with your suggestion that being able to ignore someone easily could make communications environments better; it seems like there was probably a lot of direct and indirect benefit in USENET killfiles (although I'm not such a fan of how people used them performatively, publicly announcing that they had killfiled other people -- usually by writing "PLONK!" at the end of a long rejoinder).

By this, I mean: it's likely just a handful of people, max, being an immediate problem, but when the whole “looking past your friends' flaws” thing extends to when your friends are hurting other people, you're standing by while other people get hurt. Geek Social Fallacies[0] #2 and #3 don't combine well. It's not just an FSFE problem. It's also not intrinsic to hacker culture in any way; it just tags along, causing problems. [0]: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

It seems that you have fallen for Geek Social Fallacy #2: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

Try reading this later post where he refers back to it, including the use of the terms 'geek' and 'fallacy' in the title. http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/fifteen.html

I've heard that this is somewhat common in nerdy communities, or at least common enough that someone felt moved to write about "geek social fallacies": http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

> The problem with a profile that spans unrelated services is that your persona on one shouldn't necessarily be tied to your persona on another; Google Accounts with different public-facing per-service personas are okay in a way that a single public-facing persona spanning all services isn't. G+ tried to solve this with Circles, but as far as I can tell, everything related to YouTube was assumed to be public on G+ because it was public on YouTube. G+ integration with everything seems like a massive failure of the Geek Social Fallacies: http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html .

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html "GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them."

He comes across as one of those people that suffers from most of the Geek Social Fallacies: http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

Yeah, I found that blog post really thought provoking. I think the core idea was that "it is a virtue to tolerate the outgroup" often means, in American middle-class culture, "if you are on Team Republican, do not stop associating with members of Team Democrat, no matter how much your friends and media tell you all those people are evil idiots" and vice versa. This is an interesting normative take on what you might call the "filter bubble moral panic" of the 2000s, a growing fear that people who don't agree with each other are experiencing totally separate and disconnected realities. The thing everyone's afraid of seems to be that in this new world, democracy will effectively become impossible because the ruling majority party will always be ignorant of (or totally unsympathetic to) the interests of the minority. Is the risk overblown? I dunno; how actually bad is a government shutdown, a half-year delay in Zika containment funding, etc.? Hard to say if these times are really worse and if "ignoring the other team" is really to blame. Some other content in this vein that was interesting reading: * The Shadow University -- a 1999 nonfiction book of essays about how, at American universities, concepts like "academic freedom" and "the marketplace of ideas" have entered a tension with other concepts (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060977728) * The Five Geek Social Fallacies -- a 2003 essay influential among some software-as-a-lifestyle people I know, which argues most memorably…