@user58 You're predictable

Which is a good thing in organic chemistry

In any case, I think people are talking past each other a bit here because of misuderstandings on how you're defining "SE".

But OK, coming back to the less utopic. Yes, as long as humans are interacting, you will never be completely free of politics. OK. But if we want to have an international community, then we need to avoid imposing any one view as much as possible. We do only what we need to ensure civil interaction and nothing more.

People are going to define "civil interaction" really differently.

And the parent institution, SE in this case, should strive for complete impartiality.

@user58 ORLY? :)

Point is, we should strive to keep interaction civil but we should not try and get uniformity of opinion.

@Aza Is a site on the internet an effective way to impact how it's being taught? (Genuine question, but I suspect not, I rather don't know if anything will on short-term grounds)

@Aza We can say the opinions cannot be expressed here

@Aza That's where I disagree. The views can coexist as long as the people holding them accept that they should not be expressed.

@user58 Usually I pay attention to the least passionate people in the room.

At some point, things are going to collide. And we're seeing now how that goes.

@Aza Then what was that whole 'holding space' thing about?

@user58 I think there was a particle collider aspect to this whole thing though

As I said, I have had great interactions with people I disagree with on the most fundamental issues. People whose world view I hold to be abhorrent and actively harmful to the world. I can still talk with them about the things where our views aren't relevant.

@Aza It is indeed. But only when expressed, not before.

Because as I understood it, it was offering a chance for people that may hold some extreme views to be in a place, to be exposed to different views, to have interaction... while at the same time trying to work with their own views. That doesn't mean the vies are gone, right?

Ah, while I was typing that I missed the part about expression.

We're good :D

@terdon This is how people get along. Not with chants of "justice delayed anywhere is justice denied everywhere".

I would argue the current FAQ is a pretty good start at grappling with it

@terdon Furthermore, people are bound to make stereotypes of beliefs they don't hold. If someone proclaims they're a Christian, inevitably it makes some people associate them with flat-Earthers

@Aza I am talking of objectives. What we should strive for. And for me, the best possible outcome is a network where people who hold views offensive to one another can nevertheless interact in a constructive and civil way.

I'd argue the original situation is what started the radicalization

@terdon True. And I actually think you and Aza aren't that far apart. You're just saying it differently.

@Stevoisiak Yeah, it's what I keep saying.

@Stevoisiak Does it give people the freedom to disengage (even discriminatorily)?

@Aza "this"?

@terdon People probably 'express' hurtful views through minor things. Things that you may not immediately pick up on. But once you start noticing and acting, they may have a 6-8 user fanclub already...

> One thing is required of you: that when someone states their pronouns you take notice and respect their request. We also recommend that you don't make assumptions about people's gender and that you prefer gender-neutral language when unsure.

@Tinkeringbell Yes, and that is indeed a problem.

But one I will have to think about after dinner! Later all!

@terdon Enjoy your meal :)

I'd say that quote hits the core here

I'll probably be sleeping (or at least in bed) when you return. Don't start this up again AND derail it!

If it's not brought up, how would it be any different from the minimum of drama every community gets? I don't quantify "bad", calling someone general cuss words is as harmful as denying their identity: Harmful. No more, no less. Value is lost. We're distracted from the main point. There's nothing useful to come out of it.

I do see harm in putting imaginary walls around knowledge, however.

Drinks are on @terdon while he's out, everyone!

Cranberry juice.

They also say it's good for your liver.

They're smart. They're often right.

🚽

I'm sorry, we don't serve toilets here.

@KevinB As long as you flush

@GeorgeStocker as tempted as I am to tease... most of Europe is descended from Charlemagne and Genghis khan

Oh, he has a point

@M.A.R. *carefully pours a cup of cranberry juice* ...not sure why you'd want a thing, but here you go. Almost as bad as Worf's drink.

About lawyering, not . . . whatever that was about Europe

@M.A.R. oh I know I was just having some levity that was not probably appropriate for comments on the post itself

@user58 Hey if I would successfully get to annoy you, I'd do anything

@Stevoisiak Sounds like if you don't want to deal with strange pronouns, you can just disengage from anyone who makes the request?

yup

as long as you don't do so by announcing you are doing so or being rude

@Mgetz No, really, I didn't look close enough to figure out how it's relevant. It's a fact AFAIK, and facts aren't offensive

That should be good enough. Just block and move on.

I dunno why people are so concerned about practicality

@M.A.R. he was making a comment about how respondents usually question the moderator's parentage... I was making a mild joke of that

i mean, that depends on how... factual the facts are

I mean, I've said it before, this doesn't change anything for almost everyone.

But it does mean a meta headache every once in a while; I'm referring to the edge cases trolls can use on main sites

@KevinB fun fact! arguing actual facts and data is less likely to convince people than arguing emotions!

@M.A.R. But now we can call trolls out as edge cases

@Mgetz IN THAT CASE, 'MURICA

@Stevoisiak more under bridge cases...

@KevinB Anything you ask me I would resort to scientific evidence and the veracity of articles

@M.A.R. This line of argument will likely work, yes

Impractical but it stops the nitpicks.

Nitpick.

ewwww lice

The example I keep thinking back to is the troll question that included pronouns that ended up in an edit war

I keep thinking back to a movie though

Totally unrelated

If you let the headache head-ache you, they've won.

— Albert Einstein

I prefer these trolls.

Looks like it got asked. All you can do is client-side stuff.

Are those from the Hobbit, or that cheesy Dreamworks animation thing

the latter

@DavidA wasn't that declined a while ago?

I prefer to make it appear as though i'm ignoring someone while not actually ignoring them because i want to be able to see a not totally broken conversation

@user58 Bluergh

;)

chat's ignore feature works quite well

with the exception of the avatar list being broken by it

@DavidA I would... actually advise against that just because how much SE relies on community moderation. Mods can put a user on your 'ignore' list by suspending, but we need to know they were doing stuff wrong first!

@user58 I think standardization hurts art more than people deliberately admitting their movies are crap, or even people whose movies are crap but are willing to defend it

Your Mustard Might Vary

@M.A.R. I like weird movies that break the rules. Then again, I don't tend to actually watch very many movies, soooo.

Just the bland cute characters who can sing and the bland cute characters who can't talk and the bland cute plot

I will also reference stuff without watching it.

And the bald cute Steve Carrel

@user58 Pfft, everyone does that

@Tinkeringbell Not wrong stuff. If you feel uncomfortable interacting with someone (could be an ex you just never want to see again or a person you otherwise don't want to deal with). But someone who is objectively behaving fine by community standards.

@user58 Oh, I didn't see that "don't" and was about to invite you to a movie duel

@DavidA The mods (the ones that remain anyway) are the same awesome people that the community elected. Even if SE's policy was some form of censorship (that argument is still a bit shaky) and impractical, other than two general dramas here and there, do you think they will go around enforcing mods to suspended users without context and without the assumptions of good faith?

There are some mods that i believe will go along with the company regardless of what the people who elected them want

I would try ignoring myself to see what it looks like

ignoring here in chat tho works well because it's not a total block. It's still obvious when someone that is ignored is participating, and you can temporarily show their posts without unblocking

@KevinB still, do you think mods would just start going around suspending people because "I KNEW they were gonna use the wrong pronoun"?

@Aza It would certainly simplify the disengagement process if someone wanted to go that route. If someone threatened to report me if I misgendered them, I'd be quite afraid and wish to cut off contact for a while.

No, of course not.

So we're on the same page.

I'm the header and you're the watermark

58 is the footnote

Oh, so i'm the part that gets photoshopped out

Not if you're printed

There's the law of conservation of KevinB

FWIW, since recently, all the headers I see are "This frigging document was written by DR. REALLY GREAT AWESOME BOW DOWN, PhD yo"

At least you're less promotional

@M.A.R. the doctorate might be honorary, but the name certainly is.

I might actually give the block script a test to see how well it works.

Me: "I should get some work done", Brain: "Nope you're looking at the cats slack channel"

@M.A.R. That's the most interesting part, and usually has all the sources and more in-depth info.

@M.A.R. it’s very easy in this situation for moderators to flip from “member of the community” to “enforcer and subject to SE whims” in people’s minds given recent events, especially with the optics of some moderators resigning because they disagree with the actions that SE inc has taken.

So anyone who stays will naturally be seen as more in line with SE and potentially subject to their whims.

And if you don’t trust SE right now, it’s easy to lump the remaining moderators there too, even if it’s not the case

When moderation is seen as holding power, trying to retain that power may increase mistrust given the current climate.

It’s not fair, but it is what it is.

👍

@Glorfindel I'm not going to submit a PR for a single-character edit, but there needs to be a space after the opening <span> tag on L167 of the pronouns script. Looks like I forgot that in my PR.

@ArtOfCode You're not the art of code on youtube are you?

nope

I am not on the you tubes

or any other tubes, for that matter

no public transport?

I'm in those tubes, not on them :P

Aaaand this is how Brits justify calling them "tubes"

The world needs more tube humor

We gripe about the tube, but it's pretty awesome really

@194636 I'm game. They have ignored all of my requests for that.

@194636 I'm amazed SE hasn't taken Monica up on that. I don't see what possible objections they'd have to it.

@HDE226868 tons probably. If they stripped her of her mod status without true cause, then they might want to cover their behind. Or they didn't like her at all. Or "Bob" didn't like her at all. Or they don't care that much. Or something else. Don't forget SE stayed out of most discussions on Meta.SE until very recently, and even then I don't feel they are "participating" that much, but more "toe-dipping".

meh

@M.A.R. no, You (Tube)

There's some great Shog smackdowns going on at the question about removing the old FAQ: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336374/…

> I deleted more of my own posts before you signed up than you've posted across all sites since then, @. I was also heavily involved in defining the rules for vandalism, the behavior of Historical Locks, moderator guidelines for deleting heavily-answered questions, and wrote a huge chunk of the deletion FAQ. I advised and encouraged Cesar in his handling of the old FAQ... So what's your source? –

Meh. I'm just bored with the laziness of the accusations there. At least @Sklivvz bothered to make his interesting.

If it hadn't been an "official" post, it would've been deleted a week ago as troll-bait. That we let it last so long is... Well, we had our reasons, but it still did a lot of damage.

O_o Not very welcoming though. I get that you are pissed with all that is happening, but... man, it doesn't set the proper example.

"Not very welcoming"?

I'll give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but in this case... That doesn't buy much.

@Shog9 Was part of the reason to get a sample of where the population stands on the issue? Not sure if anybody expected it to be as lopsided as 1:5 on the voting.

@Mysticial I wish I could claim something like that

But no. It was meant to be like... An appendix. Supplementary material for discussions regarding the blog post.

Except... We screwed up and gave it a lot more visibility than we did the blog.

So... We tried to just roll with it, but...

If we'd planned it, we'd have done something closer to what Cesar & Cat did yesterday: one post for the FAQ (in the normal format), one post for discussion (in the usual "new beta, post everything you got so we can iterate fast and clean up all the obsolete feedback once we're done" tradition).

Also, probably would've written an introduction so's folks knew WTH we were on about

But since we didn't, it ended up being all of that together + just a heck of a lot of confusion and angry discussion. Loads of in-fighting, heat and noise.

I'm starting to see hints of humility and contrition on both sides, so that's a start.

It got to the point where even trying to load the page with flags active was a browser-crippling experience.

FWIW, I consider myself pretty far left on the social political spectrum. But the stance implied by that 1st FAQ crossed the line - even for me. And the voting and commentary seems to suggest I'm not alone.

@Shog9 I guess from that point of view it makes sense to delete the old FAQ. Would it have been possible to highlight the differences between both versions, or provide a short summary?

> thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins. And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.

That... didn't work out too well for ol' Rehoboam

@Mysticial ha. I'm pretty right-leaning socially but I strongly believe in "live and let live". Something about the first CoC didn't sit well with me. Mostly the moralizing tone and the feeling of being talked down to.

@Laf possible, yeah. But probably not terribly productive. The goals were the same; we didn't intend to send a harsh message with the original... But, uh, when you try to avoid nuance, sometimes that's how it ends.

Maybe not totally unproductive either. It would have been easier to see what changed, how the tone was modified, etc. I haven't done the exercise myself, but if v2 of the FAQ is better, then a summary of the changes could be a good promotion tool for it.

@Laf the best promotional tool for it is reading it alone, not in the shadow of the old one. Does it work for you? Does it piss you off? Why? That's what's important, not how it changed but how it is now.

@Laf We started with the two side-by-side, and worked off of that. So I know how much changed, and how complex that comparison is. It'd be pretty brutal to try to even present that in a sensible way.

If v1 is super harsh, and v2 corrects it, then I'd personally feel much better about it, given the current circumstances. Because part of our reactions are triggered by a perceived lack of responsiveness from SE. A clear show of "we messed up, we acknowledged it, here's the changes we think will fix this" would help I believe.

@terdon Just pitching in my 2 cents, I'm not mad about this specifically, but I'm a little annoyed at SE at the moment to say the least, and I still wish things would go better. That's my uneducated vision of it.

@Laf Sorry, that didn't need to have been a reply to you. I was just pitching in my 2c as well.

I'm exceedingly annoyed at SE. But this one is something I happen to think they handled well.

The 2nd FAQ and the deletion of the first, I mean.

@Shog9 I understand, it makes sense. BTW I'm not trying to say you did wrong, I'm glad you answered my question.

@terdon I disagree, but I am ready to accept my point of view is not always aligned with others' in such matter ;)

Ha! You're not alone. Learning to disagree amicably is something we could all use right now :)

@DavidA What? Where? Again?

That's basically been meta.

@194636 This thing where you project your facial expression through the interwebs is starting to freak me out, Mr Deadpan.

:)

@DavidA Same. The compulsory aspect of it is what rubbed me the wrong way. Generally my attitude is, "if it doesn't significantly affect me, I don't care". But the 1st FAQ requires me to change the very language that I grew up speaking in ways that's not natural or face consequences. (namely the neopronouns since they aren't usually taught in school or used in media) That's a bridge too far because it requires native speakers to actively break established habits.

So, the post for clarifications of the FAQ has now dipped to negative net votes. But the FAQ itself is net positive votes. I guess that means people don't think clarifications are necessary???? That's a good thing?!!?? I just don't understand the voting. I'd have thought angry protest voters would down vote the FAQ itself more.

Thus the difficulty of forcing the entire population to change their language. I don't mind if 100 years from now English has more pronouns than Japanese. But changing this needs to start at the school level when kids are still young and haven't passed the age of plasticity where native language acquisition becomes much more difficult.

Yeah my spell checker doesn't recognize those pronouns, but it doesn't recognize a lot of perfectly cromulent words.

@Raedwald It might be because the clarifications post is featured, while the new FAQ is not

Which... seems a bit backwards

Since you'd want people to read the actual post first before reading discussion on it

@Mysticial it's actually quite easy to add verbs and nouns to English. Adjectives and adverbs are possible. Prepositions, pronouns, and articles are much more difficult.

"In English you can verb anything."

@Raedwald "I accidentally this sentence"

I will bed my going

I would (of course) design a language primarily for machine parsing and secondarily for human use. Our future AI overlords will be pleased with me for this.

@DavidA That's the "closed" vs. "open" thing that tchrist mentioned in one of his comments. Pronouns are closed in English.

@Stevoisiak It kinda does, but I feel it makes sense to feature the one where people will be posting answers.

"&" was once classified as a letter, so anything is possible.

@duplode The feedback post has over double the views of the actual updated FAQ

8k vs 3k

@Mysticial yep. He's this guy, right? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Christiansen

That means there's 5k people who have only seen discussion about an FAQ they haven't read

That... doesn't seem good

@DavidA yeah

@Stevoisiak Optimistically, most of those 5k had a quick glance at the question and chose not to engage further.

@Mysticial Yes. But the idea can be overstated. Correct English is not specified by any organisation (unlike French), but is rather described (or, if you would rather, reverse engineered from its actual usage).

@Stevoisiak At this point, I feel that a lot of people are more focused on making SE know they are pissed than actually reading what's being posted and adjusting their mood accordingly based on what they read, and not on what happened before. Might be why the feedback has so many more views that the FAQ.

I for one mourn the loss of thorn, eth, ash and wynn from the English alphabet.

uhm. Morning

o/

Hi!

Though I know nothing about it, this open/closed distinction sounds like a very interesting topic.

I wonder if there are linguistic debates on the nature of the distinction.

English is a consensus-driven language.

Just the driven

Without the consensus

Define: driven

It's whatever doesn't get your assignment drowned in red ink by your English teacher.

Not the definition I was looking for. Damn you, English!

Just me, or is the internet exceptionally broken today

But no matter how many people use "begs the question" instead of "raises the question", they're wrong!

@YvetteColomb the box that needs to turn all the bits upside down keeps getting snakes

Choked on all the sideways bits I imagine

That your accent?

Reminds me of Glitch

Good show

Apparently it's illegal to own a snake in Hawaii.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_(TV_series)

Yeah... Though they dropped an entire subplot in the last season, which irritated me

I guess the script had a

Error

...

.......

Boo

So much better. Like I have a free hour every week

Sooner or later I get sick

@Laf If I acknowledge my kids (7, and 6) feelings when they’re upset that helps to calm them down. Stack Exchange has yet to acknowledge the community’s feelings enough to calm them down.

So until that happens, yea, people are gonna bang their drums loudly so they get acknowledged.

Ironically, there’s one particular person at SE inc that everyone wants to acknowledge their feelings, and that person has been rather silent.

Beat the drum slowly and play the pipe lowly...

Which is ironic because being silent causes the drum beating to get louder.

Close enough

@shog9 do you have any preference for where that wall gets built in Colorado? I was thinking I-70 corridor and then south; cut the desert part out from the mountain part

@AGirlHasNoName “I’m sorry, I messed up.” Goes a long way

I should know, my wife hears it almost daily

<rimshot />

@AGirlHasNoName the more obstinate a person seems, the more their reversal is noted.

It doesn’t take just that; but that’s a big step.