
Richard Stallman Has Announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines - crunchiebones
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html
======
jfk13
There was a bunch of discussion already in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18274663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18274663).

------
orsenthil
<pre> Rather than trying to have the last word, look for the times when there
is no need to reply, perhaps because you already made the relevant point clear
enough. If you know something about the game of Go, this analogy might clarify
that: when the opponent's move is not strong enough to require a direct
response, it is advantageous to give it none and instead move elsewhere.
</pre>

I had to deal with someone who thought that having the last word is "a thing".
So, he will never give up on any discussion without adding a last reply. It is
hard to deal with such people.

On the game of go, can someone illustrate how it is advantageous to not have
the last word?

Also, I am not sure if this example will convince a last-word-wrong-doer, they
are in for an emotional satisfaction, not a rational one.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Offtopic but it struck me as strange that the author would choose to use Go
for this example instead of chess, which would be much more familiar to
people. Almost like a subtle form of intellectual "flexing".

~~~
bjourne
The allegory doesn't work for Chess since you almost always need to meet
advances with responses. Go is different and more strategic in that respect,
because you don't need to win every skirmish.

~~~
asimpletune
That is also true for chess.

------
bigiain
That's nicely balanced and well thought through in my opinion.

I'm particularly impressed by the second last para talking about the Gnu
organisation's only two political positions or points, and says: "We don't
require you as a contributor to agree with these two points, but you do need
to accept that our decisions will be based on them."

~~~
orsenthil
I agree it is making their stance clear on their policies and standing ground
on what they believe in.

------
pjc50
One of the first effects of this is another attempt to remove RMS's pet
favourite abortion joke from the glibc docs:
[https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/](https://lwn.net/Articles/753646/) ->
[https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-
alpha/2018-10/msg00399.html](https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-
alpha/2018-10/msg00399.html)

Will RMS comply with his own "guidelines"?

~~~
jawilson2
Apparently not: [https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-
alpha/2018-10/msg00467.html](https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-
alpha/2018-10/msg00467.html)

> More precisely, the guidelines are about how we communicate in our
> discussions, not what ideas we communicate (as long as they are pertinent to
> the topic of the list and support the goal of the project).

> These guidelines as such do not apply to manuals. Kindness as a general
> principle surely does apply to manuals, but precisely how remains to be
> decided.

> I just installed a statement in the GNU maintainer guide saying that humor
> is welcome _in general_ -- that we reject the idea of "professionalism"
> which calls for deleting humor because it is humor.

> That doesn't decide the question of the abort(3) joke. There are issues to
> decide before that.

~~~
jordigh
I wish rms had the humility to accept that his joke is not funny and is making
more people unhappy than it's making people laugh.

------
lixtra
The highest discriminatory factor I see in the tech community is the English
language. You either have to invest a lot of energy to master it or you are
left with local niche communities.

Of course that is difficult to tackle, but it can serve as a benchmark. You
can offer a french speaker to be addressed with the wrong pronoun in french or
the correct one in English. How would the majority decide?

~~~
jobigoud
It might be the first time in the history of Human Civilization that we have
the opportunity to standardize the communication pipeline on a global scale.
English is not perfect, but it's the standard we have. It's like coding
conventions, the exact choice doesn't really matter, consistency is the
important trait.

I wish we could forget about where the language is coming from and focus on
where we are going. Do we want a future where everyone can understand each
other? I do. I don't want some great ideas to be hidden for centuries because
their author happened to speak a language no one bothered translating from.

Let's standardize on English, teach it everywhere to every child, call it a
solved problem and move on.

(disclaimer: I am a French native speaker living in France).

------
ben509
This seems like a fairly incremental tweak to normal professional protocols; I
think it's one of the better guidelines I've seen.

I still disagree with framing this as "kindness" though, simply because
courtesy is a habit you practice for those times when you're _not_ feeling
kind. On good days, I may litter my speech with "thank yous" and such that
might be unnecessary given my demeanor, but on bad days it pays off as the
behavior is automatic.

Much of the document is about deescalation which really is an art if you've
ever tried to break up a fight. That they bring up the Go analogy is good,
because if you're working on project you're not just responding to respond,
but because you're trying to represent your interests; lobbying in a word.

------
dreta
The article as a whole is well-worded, and surprisingly neutral given what's
been going on in the community lately, that's why it boggles mind why you'd
write something like "This discouragement particularly affects members of
disprivileged demographics (...)". All this is going to do is upset people.

------
DannyB2
The best way to avoid conflict and encourage diversity is to force everyone to
voluntarily think alike.

~~~
KingMob
Odd, but correct. It's a heterological issue, where maximal (not total)
diversity is achieved by getting everyone to agree on the value of respecting
each other's choices as long as no harm is done.

For an example in the political realm, see Popper's Paradox of Tolerance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance),
aka, why we shouldn't tolerate neo-nazis, white supremacists, etc.

------
g_sch
I know this has been litigated into the ground by now, but I'm just struck by
the pettiness in GNU continuing to insist that:

> There are various ways to express gender neutrality in third-person singular
> pronouns in English; you do not have to use “they.”

This feels like a vanishingly small hill to die on, given the ideals that are
at stake in the GNU project. It certainly feels very out-of-place on a high-
level code of conduct such as this one.

EDIT: to clarify, I'm referring specifically to the insistence that "they" is
an invalid singular pronoun. I'm being maximally charitable when I say that
I'm not sure why RMS's personal views on what constitute "correct" pronouns
merits mention on an organization's code of conduct.

~~~
alliecat
Stallman's still upset that people use singular "they". It's bad grammar, or
something. [https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-
pronouns.html](https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html)

I go by "they" on a day-to-day basis and generally I don't have any issues
with it; it's fairly obvious when someone's referring to me singularly, and
people will sometimes use my name a little more often if it's ambiguous.

It's not a big deal except when people elect to make it a big deal; I've had
Stallman's blogpost thrown at me on IRC a few times by people who also like
dying on the vanishingly small hill that is "People who don't identify with
any gender in particular shouldn't be able to use the existing non-gendered
pronoun because it's BAD GRAMMAR and that INFRINGES ON MY RIGHTS or some shit"

Tom Scott put it well in an older video of his; "Some people are "They", get
over it!"

~~~
xoa
I'm entirely sympathetic with his preference for precision when at all
possible. One of my great pet peeves in modern usage of language is the lack
of precision of usage, which I think leads to a lack of precision of thought
and communications that creates bad feeling and wastes time unnecessarily.
When people are lazy about using words correctly they can also become more
generic over time in general, which in turn robs other people of the ability
to get their thoughts across as well down the road.

However while I think his examples of where "they" can lead to ambiguity are
fair, his argument that "we have a clean, clear and natural solution" is not
supported by his own examples. Take the first one for they:

> _" When my child was removed and placed with Dad, they internalized it and
> took it like they did something wrong."_

Let's try his "natural" answer:

> _" When my child was removed and placed with Dad, person internalized it and
> took it like pers did something wrong."_

What. That's awful. Certainly no better then "ze internalized it" or any other
entirely made up word. "Per" and "pers" and "perse" are not "equivalent and
interchangeable" with person in normal English at all, and in fact "per" is
already in usage as a preposition. He does this whole setup but then his
solution falls hilariously flat, and in fact illustrates precisely why people
use "they".

If people just want to bite the bullet and try to push a universal gender
neutral singular pronoun like "ze" or "zhe" or whatever for English I don't
have any problem with that. I think it also might be practical to achieve,
it's just "the singular of they" so plural doesn't change and nobody ever
needs to think about it again. It has the advantage of laziness, everyone can
just start using it everywhere and never have to think about it again. I don't
think it can really be pretended that anything existing can just slot in there
though, certainly not what RMS came up with.

~~~
monocasa
> One of my great pet peeves in modern usage of language is the lack of
> precision of usage

What makes you think this is a modern thing?

~~~
tedunangst
Everything bad is modern. Things used to be so much better back in the before
times.

~~~
monocasa
Make English Great Again</s>

