A Welcoming Ruby Community - Calling for A No-Ban Policy - Use A Two/Three Week Suspension For Cool Off Instead

ruby-talk
21

Quoting SHIBATA Hiroshi (hsbt@ruby-lang.org):

I just banned gerald.bauer@gmail.com.

My full support to moderators.

Carlo

···

Subject: Re: A Welcoming Ruby Community - Calling for A No-Ban Policy - Use A Two/Three Week Suspension For Cool Off Instead
  Date: Thu 25 Aug 22 07:33:18AM +0900

--
  * Se la Strada e la sua Virtu' non fossero state messe da parte,
* K * Carlo E. Prelz - fluido@fluido.as che bisogno ci sarebbe
  * di parlare tanto di amore e di rettitudine? (Chuang-Tzu)

22

:slight_smile: that's fun.

SHIBATA Hiroshi wrote:

···

I just bannedgerald.bauer@gmail.com.

23

I think we need those "abnormal" people. Here "abnormal" doesn't mean a bad
thing, it is just the opposite of the normal. Normal means most of the
population accepts. Sometimes we cannot understand some people around us no
matter how hard we try. But it shouldn't mean we should remove them. But
also we should focus on our interests. So what is the solution? I think
lower the sounds we don't interest. How? I guess not with this kind of
forum. Maybe a random discussion channel for this kind of discussions, or
Maybe a more modern forum like Discourse. Discourse will proudly sponsor
this forum and it also supports email responses so we don't leave our email
client and learn a new tool.

ミユナ <alice@coakmail.com>, 25 Ağu 2022 Per, 08:34 tarihinde şunu yazdı:

···

:slight_smile: that's fun.

SHIBATA Hiroshi wrote:
> I just bannedgerald.bauer@gmail.com.

Unsubscribe: <mailto:ruby-talk-request@ruby-lang.org?subject=unsubscribe>
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24

I think we need those "abnormal" people. Here "abnormal" doesn't mean a bad thing, it is just the opposite of the normal.

I prefer the term "heterodox".

Normal means most of the population accepts. Sometimes we cannot understand some people around us no matter how hard we try. But it shouldn't mean we should remove them.

It's called diversity.

It's interesting that the people who clamor for diversity more (the
woke crowd) are the very same people actively fighting against the
only diversity that should matter: diversity of thought.

They also claim to be in favor of tolerance, but when it comes to
people with different ideas than them, they are extremely intolerant,
and in fact straight up censor them.

I don't think there's a clear solution. We are living through an era
of extreme intolerance disguised as anti-intolerance. Everything is
justified as long as it's in the name of progress, including
censorship, which ironically is backwards, since we settled that
philosophical debate several centuries ago, and the conclusion was:
censorship is bad.

Cheers.

···

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 7:30 AM İsmail Arılık <arilik.ismail@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras

25

Hi everyone

I don’t usually contribute to this mailing list, or to the Ruby community as a whole anymore.

I think Gerald and Opti were both very annoying, but Gerald contributed with some fun gems, and Opti… idk, at least he contributed, even if it was through silly questions.

I haven’t really seen anything interesting in this mailing list for a long time, other than the contributions of 3 people, and 2 of them are now banned.

Felipe, I think your lack of understanding why people have a problem with your contributions is concerning, but I also think we should not deal with every single problem in this mailing list by banning people.

I think a cool-off ban (for maybe 2 weeks) was actually a very reasonable suggestion, and the ban of Gerald came kind of out of the blue for me (other than him being kind of annoying, and I don’t really agree with a lot of his views).

Admins, if there was a language problem, hit me up - my Japanese is good enough to discuss basic problems like this.

I really hope we can go back to a no-drama mode again

Fabian

···

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 1, 2022, at 22:45, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 7:30 AM İsmail Arılık <arilik.ismail@gmail.com> wrote:

I think we need those "abnormal" people. Here "abnormal" doesn't mean a bad thing, it is just the opposite of the normal.

I prefer the term "heterodox".

Normal means most of the population accepts. Sometimes we cannot understand some people around us no matter how hard we try. But it shouldn't mean we should remove them.

It's called diversity.

It's interesting that the people who clamor for diversity more (the
woke crowd) are the very same people actively fighting against the
only diversity that should matter: diversity of thought.

They also claim to be in favor of tolerance, but when it comes to
people with different ideas than them, they are extremely intolerant,
and in fact straight up censor them.

I don't think there's a clear solution. We are living through an era
of extreme intolerance disguised as anti-intolerance. Everything is
justified as long as it's in the name of progress, including
censorship, which ironically is backwards, since we settled that
philosophical debate several centuries ago, and the conclusion was:
censorship is bad.

Cheers.

--
Felipe Contreras

Unsubscribe: <mailto:ruby-talk-request@ruby-lang.org?subject=unsubscribe>
<http://lists.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/mailman/options/ruby-talk&gt;

26

> Normal means most of the population accepts. Sometimes we cannot
understand some people around us no matter how hard we try. But it
shouldn't mean we should remove them.

It's called diversity.

It's interesting that the people who clamor for diversity more (the
woke crowd) are the very same people actively fighting against the
only diversity that should matter: diversity of thought.

Karl Popper would like a word with you, as would Hannah Arendt.

More than that, it should be very clear that there are modes of
communication that *encourage* diverse discourse and modes which
*discourage* the same. The problem is that there are many more modes which
*discourage* such discourse — and many of them are *extremely* subtle in
the way that they work. One might even call them dog whistles. Of the two
people who were banned recently, there were two modes of anti-discursive
communication in use.

- Opti was basically running the Monty Python argument sketch, with an
extra dose of gaslighting and DARVO on anyone who happened to call him out
for his trolling.
- Gerald was basically running a noise factory that was also fairly steeped
in jingoistic expression.

Both of these were made worse by the claim toward an anti-meritocracy
conspiracy that both of them occasionally spouted. (I’m in fact, quite
*openly* against meritocracy, because I distrust what measures of merit may
exist as well as the judges of said merit. Not only that, the results of
"meritocracy" over the last ~20 years of the internet have been to be as
corrupt as a former GRU agent)

They also claim to be in favor of tolerance, but when it comes to

people with different ideas than them, they are extremely intolerant,
and in fact straight up censor them.

There are certain ideologies which explicitly must not be tolerated in a
liberal society, as they will lead to an illiberal society. Such ideologies
include, but are not limited to, fascism, racism and sexism. These are
*very* technical terms with specific definitions—but it isn’t up to me to
define them for you as I’m not here for that (except to note that
anti-$ideology is not "really $ideology all along", which is both lazy and
unreasoning). Beyond that, it is *not* inappropriate to censor
disinformation (the deliberate spread of false narratives, usually aimed at
harming already vulnerable populations) and quickly and accurately correct
misinformation (counterfactual narratives spread because of correctable
ignorance).

I don't think there's a clear solution. We are living through an era
of extreme intolerance disguised as anti-intolerance. Everything is
justified as long as it's in the name of progress, including
censorship, which ironically is backwards, since we settled that
philosophical debate several centuries ago, and the conclusion was:
censorship is bad.

Once again, that’s a nice statement, but ahistorical. Even in the U.S.,
where freeze peach is sort of the modern law of the land (it goes nicely
with the "freedumb" you see from the disinformation fascists), extensive
*government* censorship has been the norm for the vast majority of its
history, and we’re not even talking about keeping state secrets. Henry
Miller would probably like to have words with you on that, and so would
Oscar Wilde and many others.

There are many problems with freeze peach absolutism as you have described
it here, ranging from impracticality to naivete (just as bad actors must be
stopped from poisoning water wells, they should equally be stopped from
poisoning discursive wells with disinformation) to usually being a thin
veneer for a way of making already loud voices even louder to drown out the
diverse voices that scare the people who are discovering that they had
often only ended up on the top of the heap because they were the default.

-a

···

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 5:45 PM Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 7:30 AM İsmail Arılık <arilik.ismail@gmail.com> > wrote:

--
Austin Ziegler • halostatue@gmail.com • austin@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue

27

I don’t usually contribute to this mailing list, or to the Ruby community as a whole anymore.

I think Gerald and Opti were both very annoying, but Gerald contributed with some fun gems, and Opti… idk, at least he contributed, even if it was through silly questions.

I agree, I found them both very annoying, but that's not a good reason
to ban somebody.

I haven’t really seen anything interesting in this mailing list for a long time, other than the contributions of 3 people, and 2 of them are now banned.

Felipe, I think your lack of understanding why people have a problem with your contributions is concerning, but I also think we should not deal with every single problem in this mailing list by banning people.

Nobody has mentioned any problem with my contributions, in fact,
nobody has mentioned my contributions. Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

I think a cool-off ban (for maybe 2 weeks) was actually a very reasonable suggestion, and the ban of Gerald came kind of out of the blue for me (other than him being kind of annoying, and I don’t really agree with a lot of his views).

Very reasonable. In reddit a 3-strike policy with an increasing ban
period is very common.

I don't think the moderators are aware of the repercussions of
censorship. If you start banning "problematic" people (which are the
ones more likely to criticize), then very soon you end up in an echo
chamber and a monoculture. If you don't see the danger of zero thought
diversity, then I don't know what to tell you.

I stand by this quote:

"I detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to
say it" -- Voltaire

···

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 5:10 PM Fabian Zitter <fabian.zitter@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras

28

I have interacted numerous times with Opti on this mailing list. He kind of sounds like a person who needs more time to understand Ruby, perhaps he has a wrong approach to that. I wouldn't say he has ulterior motives, rather he is a person who has problems formulating questions clearly, he is also probably a kid. But it's not like his questions are totally without merit, he also many times with his questions explored lesser explored parts of the language, which was enjoying for me to answer (I may have a unique perspective on that, as I develop a Ruby compiler) and perhaps other people also benefited from that kinds of discussion.

About Gerald I won't say much, from his posts I learned about a silly thing in NFT world called "cypherpunks" which he tried to parody with a spin on teaching people Ruby programming. Perhaps also his wording didn't show that clearly and many people didn't see the parody he shown, because as we all know, many cryptocurrencies are scams and ponzi schemes - but to reiterate I must say, that he never encouraged people to invest in anything. Unfortunately the topic got boring at some point.

The mailing list is dying and while many may try to attribute that to posts of those 2 people, perhaps it's the model of the mailing list that is dying, but also I would rather say it's divisive politics that is at fault here. Western politics is often constructed this way, that both sides get fed opposite opinion on some points with no way to reconcile, because both sides get extensive frameworks to justify their views. I am participating in another open source community that decided to ban politics altogether, while there are people who I noted that have some opinions (on both sides), most really try hard not to voice that in order to not divide the community - while they see the urge to make the world a better place by sharing their views, they have a higher goal in such a community, which is a technological goal. It is going fairly nice, rarely we see any drama.

Could this potentially be a solution here? Yes, I know we all want "world peace" (insert whatever political goal you have), but perhaps let's consider that this is kind of off-topic on this mailing list and even if we considered this a grander goal than technical, let's at least consider that in the current political climate regardless of the arguments you make you won't change opinions and this mailing list isn't the exact place where change can be made. And if you persist, do note that you will participate against the community at large, as this will result in fragmentation and closure of the places that you used to visit.

···

On 9/2/22 00:10, Fabian Zitter wrote:

Hi everyone

I don’t usually contribute to this mailing list, or to the Ruby community as a whole anymore.

I think Gerald and Opti were both very annoying, but Gerald contributed with some fun gems, and Opti… idk, at least he contributed, even if it was through silly questions.

I haven’t really seen anything interesting in this mailing list for a long time, other than the contributions of 3 people, and 2 of them are now banned.

Felipe, I think your lack of understanding why people have a problem with your contributions is concerning, but I also think we should not deal with every single problem in this mailing list by banning people.

I think a cool-off ban (for maybe 2 weeks) was actually a very reasonable suggestion, and the ban of Gerald came kind of out of the blue for me (other than him being kind of annoying, and I don’t really agree with a lot of his views).

Admins, if there was a language problem, hit me up - my Japanese is good enough to discuss basic problems like this.

I really hope we can go back to a no-drama mode again

Fabian

Sent from my iPhone

29

> Normal means most of the population accepts. Sometimes we cannot understand some people around us no matter how hard we try. But it shouldn't mean we should remove them.

It's called diversity.

It's interesting that the people who clamor for diversity more (the
woke crowd) are the very same people actively fighting against the
only diversity that should matter: diversity of thought.

Karl Popper would like a word with you, as would Hannah Arendt.

I am extremely familiar with Karl Popper's work, and I'm 100% sure you
are misinterpreting the quote you are alluding to. Go ahead and paste
it explicitly, along with what you think it means. Then I will point
out to you the key word that you almost certainly missed (because
everyone who uses that quote misses it).

They also claim to be in favor of tolerance, but when it comes to
people with different ideas than them, they are extremely intolerant,
and in fact straight up censor them.

There are certain ideologies which explicitly must not be tolerated in a liberal society, as they will lead to an illiberal society.

Censoring these ideologies doesn't produce the desired result, in
fact: it produces the exact opposite. The people espousing these
ideologies don't just magically disappear, their work doesn't
disappear, and you leave the people who were on the fence no option
but to explore them in the shadows.

Just like the Streisand effect, censorship makes these ideologies more
popular, because now they are not being actively debated against. The
best way to fight bad ideas is with debate and censorship kills that
possibility.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Once again, that’s a nice statement, but ahistorical. Even in the U.S., where freeze peach is sort of the modern law of the land (it goes nicely with the "freedumb" you see from the disinformation fascists), extensive *government* censorship has been the norm for the vast majority of its history, and we’re not even talking about keeping state secrets. Henry Miller would probably like to have words with you on that, and so would Oscar Wilde and many others.

Not once in history has censorship achieved the desired effect. Not
once. But I guess the only thing we learn from history is that we
don't learn from history.

We will have to experience the deleterious effects of censorship, yet
again, in order to fully grasp why it's so bad, just like philosophers
concluded centuries ago.

···

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 5:29 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 5:45 PM Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 7:30 AM İsmail Arılık <arilik.ismail@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras

30

Nobody has mentioned any problem with my contributions, in fact,
nobody has mentioned my contributions. Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

Yes and no.

One’s tone may affect how one’s contributions are received. Sometimes,
you’re absolutely right that it’s tone policing — which is a bad thing.
Sometimes, however, contributions can’t be assessed because the tone
*becomes* the primary contribution. To put it in terms related to one of
the recently banned individuals, the optimist, the tone became the entirety
of the contribution. The absolute certainty that he was right or that what
he had found was an absolute *bug* (or whatever) despite repeatedly being
shown evidence to the contrary meant that one could *not* have productive
discourse with him. He was volubly promoting disinformation about Ruby (it
changed from misinformation to disinformation once he was informed of the
actual way multiple times and he continued to repeat the original incorrect
assertion with increasing volume and rancor).

I do think that there are differences as well between the two incidents you
recently related about yourself. The earlier incident was clearly something
which required an attention getter, because you were reporting a problem
and other people agreed with you that it was a problem, but the responsible
person chose not only to not act, but to dismiss it as a problem in the
first place. The later incident may involve some overreaction, but as I
read your contributions to some of those discussions, there was a
*bluntness* to them that bordered on disrespect. What I don’t have is the
full picture of your interactions with the maintainers, and we’re all
human. In the later incident, I read your interactions and had negative
reactions to the tone, and one of the messages was, IMO, something that
shouldn’t have been posted at all; it had no outright attacks on
individuals, but it had a strong implication on a level of incompetence
and/or malice on the maintainers—I personally would have considered it out
of bounds and worth a warning.

People will remember brusqueness, slights, or outright insults over time
and it can hit a point where someone clearly thinks that you’ve finally
crossed a line (or you’ve done so once too often).

Ultimately, while it may be necessary to push back against tone policing,
or it may be necessary to shock people into action, it shouldn’t be a
surprise if there’s blowback from the people who remember that and remember
the angry reaction. And if your ongoing interactions continue to have a
sharpness or lack of consideration, eventually your tone *is* your
contribution, whether you want to believe so or not.

-a

···

--
Austin Ziegler • halostatue@gmail.com • austin@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue

31

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Once again, yes and no. There is a concept of giving ideas a platform, vs.
giving them space to die because they’re so wrong. In the idea of sunlight
being the best disinfectant, the most effective fight against the KKK was
in the 50s when the Superman radio show treated them as comedic villains.
The Enquirer was treated as a joke for the vast majority of its history,
but the modern successors like OANN and InfoWars have—almost entirely
without any legal consequence, until recently—been passing *disinformation*
freely and increasing the polarization and radicalization of people with
that violent disinformation, and their disinformation on medical treatment
during a pandemic has certainly killed people that shouldn’t have died.

Lately, we’ve been erring on the side of giving the ideas which are
themselves inimical to liberalism (in the Popper sense) platforms which
they have been using to destroy liberalism and promote disinformation.

Not once in history has censorship achieved the desired effect. Not

once. But I guess the only thing we learn from history is that we
don't learn from history.

This is, in fact, not true. Sure, over the long scale, censorship doesn’t
work. But nothing works over the long scale. But prior restraint absolutely
can and does work, and such is routinely used in a number of contexts to
successfully prevent the publication or dissemination of information that
can get people killed.

I’m not really in favour of censorship in general, but the removal of
someone continually disruptive to a community is not censorship. The denial
of a platform to people who want to cause harm isn’t censorship. They
aren’t being denied their voice, they’re just not getting a megaphone to
amplify it.

-a

···

--
Austin Ziegler • halostatue@gmail.com • austin@halostatue.ca
http://www.halostatue.ca/ • http://twitter.com/halostatue

32

Nobody has mentioned any problem with my contributions, in fact,
nobody has mentioned my contributions. Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

Yes and no.

One’s tone may affect how one’s contributions are received.

But it shouldn't.

The absolute certainty that he was right or that what he had found was an absolute *bug* (or whatever) despite repeatedly being shown evidence to the contrary meant that one could *not* have productive discourse with him.

This has absolutely nothing to do with tone. The problem was not *how*
he was saying things, the problem was *what* he was saying. The real
problem was the content, not the form (although the form wasn't ideal
either).

People will remember brusqueness, slights, or outright insults over time and it can hit a point where someone clearly thinks that you’ve finally crossed a line (or you’ve done so once too often).

Yeah, and people will eat too much sugar, smoke tobacco, watch too
much TV, and have extreme dislike for the out-group bordering on
xenophobia.

The fact that people do these things doesn't mean they are good,
desirable, or productive.

Ultimately, while it may be necessary to push back against tone policing, or it may be necessary to shock people into action, it shouldn’t be a surprise if there’s blowback from the people who remember that and remember the angry reaction. And if your ongoing interactions continue to have a sharpness or lack of consideration, eventually your tone *is* your contribution, whether you want to believe so or not.

It is 100% possible to focus on the substance of the contribution and
completely ignore the tone. People chose not to do that, but it's a
possibility.

I just sent a patch to the mailing list [1]. This is a completely
technical contribution, and people can choose to focus on that. Or
they could go on and on endlessly about my tone. It is their choice.

I already know people are going to ignore my technical contribution
and go on endlessly about my tone. How? Because people are humans.
People prefer easy things to harder things, and reviewing a patch is
harder than expressing an opinion shared by the majority. This is the
law of triviality [1], or bikeshedding effect. It is natural for
humans to endlessly discuss the color of a bikeshed (which is
trivial), rather than deliberate on an atomic reactor (which is
important). Very few people (if any) have the expertise, the time, or
the willingness to leave a comment about code, on the other hand
everyone has an opinion about tone and zero expertise is required to
leave a comment.

It's possible for humans to consciously go against their instincts and
to what is objectively more productive, but most people don't.

Cheers.

[1] [PATCH] Add Gem.default_install
[2] Law of triviality - Wikipedia

···

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 7:12 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras

33

Hi everyone again

I honestly don’t care much about what the other people said, and I kind of regret spending so much time reading through it.

Are you guys ever trying to talk about anything other than yourselves?

I vote to unban Opti and Gerald, but with a warning. Gerald, please keep your political opinions to yourself, and Opti try to google before asking weird questions about a situation no one ever runs into, unless they are using your exact stack - no offense, but stackoverflow seems to be your jam.

Regards
Fabian

···

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 2, 2022, at 2:15, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 7:12 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

Nobody has mentioned any problem with my contributions, in fact,
nobody has mentioned my contributions. Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

Yes and no.

One’s tone may affect how one’s contributions are received.

But it shouldn't.

The absolute certainty that he was right or that what he had found was an absolute *bug* (or whatever) despite repeatedly being shown evidence to the contrary meant that one could *not* have productive discourse with him.

This has absolutely nothing to do with tone. The problem was not *how*
he was saying things, the problem was *what* he was saying. The real
problem was the content, not the form (although the form wasn't ideal
either).

People will remember brusqueness, slights, or outright insults over time and it can hit a point where someone clearly thinks that you’ve finally crossed a line (or you’ve done so once too often).

Yeah, and people will eat too much sugar, smoke tobacco, watch too
much TV, and have extreme dislike for the out-group bordering on
xenophobia.

The fact that people do these things doesn't mean they are good,
desirable, or productive.

Ultimately, while it may be necessary to push back against tone policing, or it may be necessary to shock people into action, it shouldn’t be a surprise if there’s blowback from the people who remember that and remember the angry reaction. And if your ongoing interactions continue to have a sharpness or lack of consideration, eventually your tone *is* your contribution, whether you want to believe so or not.

It is 100% possible to focus on the substance of the contribution and
completely ignore the tone. People chose not to do that, but it's a
possibility.

I just sent a patch to the mailing list [1]. This is a completely
technical contribution, and people can choose to focus on that. Or
they could go on and on endlessly about my tone. It is their choice.

I already know people are going to ignore my technical contribution
and go on endlessly about my tone. How? Because people are humans.
People prefer easy things to harder things, and reviewing a patch is
harder than expressing an opinion shared by the majority. This is the
law of triviality [1], or bikeshedding effect. It is natural for
humans to endlessly discuss the color of a bikeshed (which is
trivial), rather than deliberate on an atomic reactor (which is
important). Very few people (if any) have the expertise, the time, or
the willingness to leave a comment about code, on the other hand
everyone has an opinion about tone and zero expertise is required to
leave a comment.

It's possible for humans to consciously go against their instincts and
to what is objectively more productive, but most people don't.

Cheers.

[1] [PATCH] Add Gem.default_install
[2] Law of triviality - Wikipedia

--
Felipe Contreras

Unsubscribe: <mailto:ruby-talk-request@ruby-lang.org?subject=unsubscribe>
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34

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Once again, yes and no. There is a concept of giving ideas a platform, vs. giving them space to die because they’re so wrong. In the idea of sunlight being the best disinfectant, the most effective fight against the KKK was in the 50s when the Superman radio show treated them as comedic villains.

KKK is not an idea, it's an organization. And that idea behind it is
still pretty alive in 2022.

The Enquirer was treated as a joke for the vast majority of its history, but the modern successors like OANN and InfoWars have—almost entirely without any legal consequence, until recently—been passing *disinformation* freely and increasing the polarization and radicalization of people with that violent disinformation,

Information cannot be violent, and there's no such thing as an arbiter
of truth. What you call "disinformation" is in many instances true,
and even eventually deemed true by self-appointed arbiters for truth
like the New York Times.

People are very quick to forget what was labeled as "disinformation"
in the past, like the lab leak theory, which was labeled a batshit
crazy conspiracy theory and big tech social media platforms used to
ban people merely for bringing it up.

Oops, turns out it wasn't a crazy conspiracy theory, it was a
reasonable theory that the USA White House ended up investigating at
depth.

This is the nature of your so-called "disinformation".

and their disinformation on medical treatment during a pandemic has certainly killed people that shouldn’t have died.

This is not a fact, this is an assumption that you are making based on
your political bias.

You may be sure of this, just like I'm sure you were sure the lab leak
theory was crazy, but it isn't a certainty.

I'm not going to argue with you against political positions which have
absolutely nothing to do with ruby. All I'm going to say is that there
are people who disagree with your "facts", I would even venture to say
at least 50% of people disagree this is a fact.

Any intellectually honest person would have to accept that this is at
best a very strongly held opinion, not a fact, and certainly not a
universally-accepted fact.

Not once in history has censorship achieved the desired effect. Not
once. But I guess the only thing we learn from history is that we
don't learn from history.

This is, in fact, not true. Sure, over the long scale, censorship doesn’t work. But nothing works over the long scale.

If you think censoring the discussion about the lab leak theory
"worked"--even if it was for just one year--then I don't think your
definition of "work" and mine aren't remotely compatible.

I care about believing as few false things as possible, and as many
true things as possible. Actually true, not "true for now".

In the pursuit of this objective censorship *always* hinders.

···

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 7:26 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras

35

If you don't see your tone or the way in which you engage others as a contribution, then we may very well have identified the problem.

···

On Sep 1, 2022, at 16:08, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

36

Yeah? Please explain to me how me being me is a contribution.

···

On Sat, Sep 3, 2022 at 1:06 AM Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:

> On Sep 1, 2022, at 16:08, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

> Everyone has a laser-sharp
> focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

If you don't see your tone or the way in which you engage others as a contribution, then we may very well have identified the problem.

--
Felipe Contreras

37

Everyone has a laser-sharp
focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.

If you don't see your tone or the way in which you engage others as a contribution, then we may very well have identified the problem.

Yeah? Please explain to me how me being me is a contribution.

"You being you" is euphemism for you being an ass to others, so I'm not terribly inclined to engage.

···

On Sep 2, 2022, at 23:55, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 3, 2022 at 1:06 AM Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:

On Sep 1, 2022, at 16:08, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sep 1, 2022, at 18:15, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 7:12 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes and no.

One’s tone may affect how one’s contributions are received.

But it shouldn't.

Ah.

Your "shoulds" don't matter one bit. That's just not how people work. And yes, that matters, sometimes even more than being right. The title of your post "My tone doesn't make me wrong" sums up the problem pretty well. You might not be wrong, but that doesn't really matter, does it? If being right was all that matters, well, your patch would be in datetime already, wouldn't it? But it isn't all that matters, and so your patch isn't merged.

The problem, as I see it, is you seem convinced that being right is more important than pretty much anything else.

Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?

This is easily the most important lesson I've learned in my entire career. Learned the hard way, I might add. The nice thing is that lesson can be learned at any time, and there's a lot of nuance, layers, and flip-sides to the lesson as well... but it's also the type of lesson that can't be learned until one is ready to embrace it.

38

>>> Everyone has a laser-sharp
>>> focus on my tone, not my contributions. They are two different things.
>>
>> If you don't see your tone or the way in which you engage others as a contribution, then we may very well have identified the problem.
>
> Yeah? Please explain to me how me being me is a contribution.

"You being you" is euphemism for you being an ass to others, so I'm not terribly inclined to engage.

The fact that people say I'm an ass doesn't mean I am an ass. If I say
"you are wrong", that's not me being an ass, that's me making a
statement of fact, if somebody gets hurt by such a statement, the
problem is them being too fragile, not me.

When people complain about what I say, 90% of the time is not actually
my tone, it's the content of what I'm saying they don't like (like
"you are wrong"). 9% of the time is things they would have said
differently, 0.9% of the time is something they misinterpreted, and
the 0.1% of the time you could conceivably argue that I was genuinely
being an ass is actually far below the average.

For example, one thing I never do is insult people. I challenge you to
find a single instance where I called somebody an ass, like you just
did to me.

It baffles me how people do not see this glaring double standard. If I
say "you are wrong", that's me being incredibly toxic, but when people
say to me "you are an ass", that's A-OK.

I guess as long as you consider me on the enemy team any fouls I
receive are actually a positive thing.

Either way, If you don't substantiate your claim, then your claim is dismissed.

>
>>
>> Yes and no.
>>
>> One’s tone may affect how one’s contributions are received.
>
> But it shouldn't.

Ah.

Your "shoulds" don't matter one bit. That's just not how people work.

Who is making excuses now? The whole project of human civilization is
to improve "how people work". People in 2022 don't "work" like people
in the year 0 worked, and if we do things right people in the year
2100 will "work" better than today... but not if we resign ourselves
to say "that's how people work".

Progress requires changing how people "work", even if it's only marginally.

If being right was all that matters, well, your patch would be in datetime already, wouldn't it? But it isn't all that matters, and so your patch isn't merged.

The patch was merged:

    DateTime.strptime('0 +0100', '%s %z').zone
    => "+01:00"

I guess you didn't actually read the article.

···

On Sat, Sep 3, 2022 at 9:16 PM Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:

> On Sep 2, 2022, at 23:55, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 3, 2022 at 1:06 AM Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:
>>> On Sep 1, 2022, at 16:08, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 1, 2022, at 18:15, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 7:12 PM Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:

--
Felipe Contreras