Code, conflict, and conduct [LWN.net]

Code, conflict, and conduct

Posted Sep 19, 2018 13:24 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
Parent article: Code, conflict, and conduct

I'm starting to believe that computing academia needs a code of conduct, at least for paper reviews. Many are unnecessarily harsh. Our field is known for "eating its young." High profile adoptions like this may help change our overall behavior.

Code, conflict, and conduct

Posted Sep 19, 2018 20:04 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

For better and for worse, I really do not think this is special to computing, but more academia.

It's a difficult space to apply safeguards to, or provide recourse for abuse. There are many essentially completely independent parties, and there's a relative lack of central mechanisms where cultural norms for interparty treatment can be hammered out or advanced.

I have many personal stories from the realms of language study, music, astronomy, and other fields where people's careers were derailed by blatant sexism and other such unpleasantness.

From my slightly greater visibility into the space of criminal justice, I think some of the baselines for behavior are leaking into at least conferences. So I think there's hope. I think many people in academia are coming to some of the same conclusions you are.

Code, conflict, and conduct

Posted Sep 19, 2018 20:09 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

I really hope so. My occasional contact with other fields (field-work bio, archeology) give me hope. But I know how much work it is for me to re-write my initial, scathing review. Those re-writes open many windows into my own mind. The work is unpaid work, however, and I'm 100% "soft money." That is difficult to manage.

Code, conflict, and conduct

Posted Sep 20, 2018 9:48 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

There's also a dynamic where some of the abusive people are brilliant in their field; they are permitted a degree of leniency because of their undoubted expertise. This then results in other abusive people who aren't brilliant believing that they are being unfairly treated because they're not allowed the same degree of leniency as the brilliant experts. This dynamic can become cyclic, depending on how the abusive people are treated each time.