Subject: Re: [Gendispatch] Diversity and Inclusiveness in the IETF

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2021 03:33:16 -0800

On 2/27/21 7:00 PM, Fernando Gont wrote:
> Hello , Phillip,
>
> On 27/2/21 14:15, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> [....]
>>
>> TERM is in a similar situation. We are going to need to deal with a 
>> lot of cross cultural issues and even within the Anglosphere.
>>
>> Take the OK hand gesture. Until a few years ago it had no facsist 
>> associations whatsoever. Then a group of racists on 4-Chan decided to 
>> start using the gesture 'pretending' it to be a racist gang sign. And 
>> of course the minute that racists started flashing it as a gang sign, 
>> it became a racist gang sign. And of course, deliberately insulting 
>> people and then telling them they must treat it as a joke or they 
>> will 'look stupid', is simply a way to double down on the insult. 
>> Bully, bully. swagger, swagger, sneer, sneer, oh why are we being 
>> cancelled?
>>
>>
>> Meaning is determined by usage. Who is using the term, why they are 
>> using it, matter.
>
> I'm not sure what this means.  That said, given the number of 
> countries and cultures on this globe, I doubt anyone could really 
> expect that people should be aware about stuff like the stuff you're 
> referencing.
>
> For instance, I don't know what's 4-chan (some online forum?), or even 
> what you call the "ok sign" -- here we probably have at least to 
> different signs for it.
>
> In a multi-cultural environment, you probably *need* to apply Postel's 
> principle.

   That is exactly right!

   The thing is, the OK symbol still has no "fascist" association. It 
was not
racists, it was a group of trolls that wanted to see what ridiculous thing
they could get people to believe. These trolls did things like convince
people to put their iphones in a microwave oven and so they decided to have
a go at the unfortunate trend to label everything "racist".

   It became "Operation O-KKK". As one 4-channer said, "Leftists have dug so
deep down in their lunacy, we must force [them] to dig more." In an effort
to recover lost pride, said leftists realized they should probably stop
digging and they decided to say that it wasn't them that were fooled, it was
really actual racists that got fooled and the innocuous symbol really became
racist. They still can't admit they got pranked.

   This is why it is important to set the record straight on this bit of
folklore. There is really no racist baggage associated with the OK gesture
but now people feel empowered to selectively condemn people who use it. It
has become a weapon to attack opponents. And that's where it becomes
dangerous. "Who is using the term" matters, as PHB said. What it boils down
to is: I can use it because I'm good, when my opponent uses it, though, it's
racism straight up.

   Which brings us back to TERM. We need to avoid the temptation to include
these sorts of subjectively "bad" terms. Especially when they are so
specific to one subset of one culture. Instead of selectively applying a
rule-- "who is using this term?"-- we should assume the best in what we 
hear,
and we should be careful in what we say, something like that.

>> And yes, there is a partisan political dimension to this. I didn't 
>> remove the terms 'master' etc.' from the Mesh specifications because 
>> I was concerned they might cause offense. I removed them because I 
>> want to make absolutely clear that I oppose the fascist seditionists 
>> who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th.
>
> I believe that our ability to do useful work may be endangered if our 
> documents are going to become "political statements".
>
> (quite the contrary, there reason for which I'd be keen to avoid 
> specific terms is for the possibility that might offend e.g. a fellow 
> colleague)

   Yes, these stunning and brave gestures of language policing have no
place here.

>> When a bully appears and attempts to appropriate the US flag as his 
>> own personal banner, there has to be resistance. Defining the exact 
>> means by which the US flag is to be worshiped by taking away the 
>> career of the man who defied him was a way of claiming sole ownership 
>> of the interpretation of the nation's symbols. Which was of course 
>> the reason we needed to demolish the monuments to their ideology.
>
> This thread was started in the hopes of fostering diversity and 
> inclusiveness in the IETF.
>
> I don't think discussion of USA internal political affairs is of use 
> for such purpose.

   Amen!*

   Dan.

* 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/01/06/amen-awomen-rep-cleaver-religion-gender-column/4142111001/

-- 
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 14:31:33 -0500

On 3/2/21 6:33 AM, Dan Harkins wrote:

> has become a weapon to attack opponents. 

I think the lesson for IETF and TERM there is "be very cautious about 
creating new weapons that can be used to attack opponents".   Because 
people can and will use such weapons for purely political ends, e.g. to 
demonize the people who are promoting ideas that the attackers believe 
will harm their interests.   It's often easier to attack people 
personally than to attack their technical contributions, and we want to 
be very careful about legitimizing such attacks.

Keith

---

From: Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 13:37:24 -0800

On 3/2/2021 11:31 AM, Keith Moore wrote:

> people can and will use such weapons for purely political ends, e.g. 
> to demonize the people who are promoting ideas that the attackers 
> believe will harm their interests.   It's often easier to attack 
> people personally than to attack their technical contributions, and we 
> want to be very careful about legitimizing such attacks. 

It could be say that demonizing the OK gesture is an attack on veterans. 
In the French air force, that gesture was part of the standard ground 
check. So much noise that you can't speak, so the mechanics used it to 
signal all clear. I suppose the same was true in other NATO countries. 
As a consequence, it was widely used in regular communication between 
service members to signal that things were fine. I sometime find myself 
doing it out of habit, and I suppose others do too.

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 16:53:35 -0500

On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 4:37 PM Christian Huitema <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> demonize the people who are promoting ideas that the attackers believe will
> harm their interests.   It's often easier to attack people personally than
> to attack their technical contributions, and we want to be very careful
> about legitimizing such attacks.
>
> signal all clear. I suppose the same was true in other NATO countries. As a
> consequence, it was widely used in regular communication between service
> members to signal that things were fine. I sometime find myself doing it
> out of habit, and I suppose others do too.
>
> -- Christian Huitema
>

The issue is not the fact that it is a legitimate gesture with a widespread
legitimate use. What creates an issue is that a particular group of people
decided to subvert that meaning.

And no, I do not accept Dan's interpretation of events here. If you have a
group of swaggering bullies discussing ways to 'own the libs' who come up
with the idea of 'pretending' that a certain sign has a racist
interpretation, the outcome is that other groups of people with swastikas
are going to end up using that sign with precisely that racist meaning.

There is a phrase 'whistling Dixie'. Dan Emmett's lyrics aren't explicitly
racist but the context in which they were presented is the runaway slave
pining for his former bondage. It is an anti-abolitionist song. And
'whistling Dixie' means making a coded racist reference whose meaning can
be denied by the swaggering bully who knows full well that it is not being
missed.

Implausible deniability is a real thing.

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 17:21:13 -0500

On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 10:38 PM John Wroclawski <[email-masked]> wrote:

>
>
> > On Feb 25, 2021, at 4:21 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> [email-masked]> wrote:
> >>> Good point about publications. RFCs are publications, too, so there is
> definitely some ROI in (co-)authoring an RFC as an academic. However,
> usually the entire process takes much longer than writing academic papers.
> And I'm not sure how academia at large values RFCs relative to papers, but
> at least in the part that I know, I would say they're valued.
> >>
> >> One thing we did to increase the value of RFCs to academics was to
> assign them DOIs, which at least for universities in some geos is a
> prerequisite to even recognizing RFCs as academic output.
> >
> > Nevertheless, it is in general hard to get RFCs recognised as valuable
> for tenure and promotion purposes, compared to more traditional publication
> streams such as highly-rated journals. That's one reason we did
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1672308.1672315 but I'm not sure it has
> had much impact.
>
> Seconding Brian’s comment (and Keith’s in the next msg), the DOI effort
> and CCR articles were excellent, necessary first steps, but by themselves
> they’re not likely to change the landscape very much, I think.
>
> The issue is more fundamental. Academia wishes to claim that its highest
> value publications are “original research”, and consensus-driven standards
> with the stated goal of codifying existing or emerging practice don’t
> “look” like that. My weasel words are because both sides of this stereotype
> are sometimes truly true and sometimes, well, not. But it's the perception,
> and it’ll be really hard to get the academic publication world to weigh
> RFCs heavily without changing it in some way.
>
> Which, I think, might possibly be doable. Academia does have other values
> - you can get brownie points for a good survey paper, for example, because
> you’re "systematizing knowledge" - and increasingly (although not as much
> as one might hope) work that validates research results by showing the
> they’re repeatable is seen as publishable. But the trick here is to frame
> this as a case that RFCs and IETF participation advance some substantive
> academic value - not just to argue that they follow the “form” of academic
> publication by being peer-reviewed and having DOIs. I’m not sure if
> anyone’s every quite tried to do this, but it seems at least potentially
> possible.
>

+1

I have the profound luxury of not needing to play the academic game for
either recognition or for research funding. As far as I am aware, I am the
only person currently working on TKI. I don't expect that to change soon.

The way to fix Academia is to look at the funding structures that support
it. MIT tenure committees don't look at the number of publications in
academic journals because they think them a good way to assess the
intellectual calibre of a candidate. They use them because that is the
yardstick they know that DARPA, NSF, etc use. And they use them because
they can't currently think of a better one.

So the way to fix the problem is to fix Academia. Which is something that
might well take half a century or more to fully realize. But a start is
being made.

The UK recently made a requirement that all government funded research has
to be published in journals that are open access. While discussing this
with one of the politicians behind the move I pointed out that they were
going to be facing opposition from UK academics who were likely to find it
harder to get positions at prestigious overseas universities. Turned out
that was a feature, not a bug.
If we had a digital environment that allowed a better understanding of the
intellectual contributions being made by individual academics than
publications in academic journals, there would be a lot of interest from
all the stakeholders.

---

From: "Bron Gondwana" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2021 09:34:40 +1100

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021, at 08:53, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 4:37 PM Christian Huitema <[email-masked]> wrote:

>>> I think the lesson for IETF and TERM there is "be very cautious about creating new weapons that can be used to attack opponents".   Because people can and will use such weapons for purely political ends, e.g. to demonize the people who are promoting ideas that the attackers believe will harm their interests.   It's often easier to attack people personally than to attack their technical contributions, and we want to be very careful about legitimizing such attacks.
>> It could be say that demonizing the OK gesture is an attack on veterans. In the French air force, that gesture was part of the standard ground check. So much noise that you can't speak, so the mechanics used it to signal all clear. I suppose the same was true in other NATO countries. As a consequence, it was widely used in regular communication between service members to signal that things were fine. I sometime find myself doing it out of habit, and I suppose others do too.

> 
> The issue is not the fact that it is a legitimate gesture with a widespread legitimate use. What creates an issue is that a particular group of people decided to subvert that meaning.

That is a totally unworkable standard.

By that standard, if "the racists"[tm] decided to go all in on the "I like my coffee" memes (CONTENT WARNING: search at your peril) then me slurping down my large coffee without milk becomes a racist and vaguely homoerotic act with no change of intent or behaviour from me.

Bron.

--
  Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
  [email-masked]

---

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2021 15:46:01 -0800

On 3/2/21 2:34 PM, Bron Gondwana wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 2, 2021 at 4:37 PM Christian Huitema <[email-masked] 
>> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>>
>>>     I think the lesson for IETF and TERM there is "be very cautious
>>>     about creating new weapons that can be used to attack
>>>     opponents".   Because people can and will use such weapons for
>>>     purely political ends, e.g. to demonize the people who are
>>>     promoting ideas that the attackers believe will harm their
>>>     interests.   It's often easier to attack people personally than
>>>     to attack their technical contributions, and we want to be very
>>>     careful about legitimizing such attacks.
>>
>>     It could be say that demonizing the OK gesture is an attack on
>>     veterans. In the French air force, that gesture was part of the
>>     standard ground check. So much noise that you can't speak, so the
>>     mechanics used it to signal all clear. I suppose the same was
>>     true in other NATO countries. As a consequence, it was widely
>>     used in regular communication between service members to signal
>>     that things were fine. I sometime find myself doing it out of
>>     habit, and I suppose others do too.
>>
>>     -- Christian Huitema
>>
>>
>> The issue is not the fact that it is a legitimate gesture with a 
>> widespread legitimate use. What creates an issue is that a particular 
>> group of people decided to subvert that meaning.
>

   Exactly! There was no issue created by authoritarian communist 
dictatorships
deciding to subvert the meaning of "democratic" or "people's republic". We
all knew that the Federal Republic of Germany was the good guys and the
German Democratic Republic was the bad guys and we all still understood
what "democracy" meant.

> By that standard, if "the racists"[tm] decided to go all in on the "I 
> like my coffee" memes (CONTENT WARNING: search at your peril) then me 
> slurping down my large coffee without milk becomes a racist and 
> vaguely homoerotic act with no change of intent or behaviour from me.

   We can't allow some fringe group of people-- be they PHB's swaggering
bullies or the leftists who got punked by 4chan trolls-- to decide what
words mean for the rest of us.

   The OK sign is used as part of a standard ground check in the French 
air force.
It's also used by divers to tell each other that things are just fine 
underwater.
And if some rando somewhere thinks it's the symbol of white supremacy then
just hope he's not flying your plane or diving with you.

   Dan.

---

From: Fernando Gont <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2021 23:07:20 -0300

On 2/3/21 18:53, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
[...]
>>     interests.   It's often easier to attack people personally than to
>>     attack their technical contributions, and we want to be very
[...]
> group of people decided to subvert that meaning.

Are you proposing to abolish religion, religious institutions, national 
symbols such as flags, military organizations, governments, etc., too?

It is very hard for me to think about one of those that has not been 
used to or associated with atrocities.

Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [email-masked]
PGP Fingerprint: 6666 31C6 D484 63B2 8FB1 E3C4 AE25 0D55 1D4E 7492

---

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2021 19:32:55 -0800

On 3/2/21 1:53 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>     mechanics used it to signal all clear. I suppose the same was true
>     in other NATO countries. As a consequence, it was widely used in
>     regular communication between service members to signal that
>     things were fine. I sometime find myself doing it out of habit,
>     and I suppose others do too.
>
>     -- Christian Huitema
>
>

   I was in a far eastern airport (it might've been Macau or maybe 
Taipei, I'm not
100% sure) several years ago and this airport had prayer rooms for those 
so inclined.
They used an icon to indicate which religion the room catered to. The 
Christian prayer
room had a cross, the Muslim prayer room had a crescent, and the 
Buddhist prayer room
had a swastika.

   Being a western person, the swastika is repulsive to me due to the 
fact that,
how you put it, "a particular group of people decided to subvert its 
meaning." But
you know what? I didn't attempt to impose my view of religious 
iconography on the
people running this airport. I didn't try to tell them that there was an 
issue
with their religious iconography. That would've been boorish and rude.

   So maybe some restraint is in order on the idea that there are issues 
surrounding
some words or gestures that you think a particular group of people 
decided to subvert.
If you don't want to use "master key" in your I-D or feel that the OK 
gesture is
a symbol of white supremacy then bully for you, but don't try and impose 
that on
everyone else.

   Widespread legitimate use makes use of a thing legitimate, a group of 
trolls or
"swaggering bullies" notwithstanding. That's how it works.

   regards,

   Dan.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 08:18:10 -0500

On 3/2/21 9:07 PM, Fernando Gont wrote:

> Are you proposing to abolish religion, religious institutions, 
> national symbols such as flags, military organizations, governments, 
> etc., too? 

I thought it was John Lennon who did that :)

---

From: Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2021 06:12:44 -0800

Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]> writes:

> The way to fix Academia is to look at the funding structures that support it.
...
> So the way to fix the problem is to fix Academia.

You highlight the problem well that there are multiple confounding
issues that all mingle together.

(Most) RFCs are typically harder to get published than academic
papers.  They take multiple years to get published and require extensive
negotiations with many parties.  This leads to:

1) Its not really a viable goal for students to take on, since they're
likely to graduate before the completion of the publication effort.  Nor
can you ensure consensus, and isn't easy "fallback publication venues" if
you fail the IETF as the tier-1 to publish in.

2) That leaves staff and faculty to do the work, which means funding
agencies must understand both the long term commitment required (2-3
years beyond the point of the solution being initially documented) and
the cost required (its not the travel cost -- its the labor required for
said negotiations).  Then there is the "running code" cost, that will
likely keep changing as the eventually-to-be-standard keeps changing
underneath the code.

When I've discussed contracting with funding sources before for research
work, and explained situation #2 I've often given them two quotes: one
just to do the work and a second that included a standardization-effort
cost that wasn't even assured.  Many organizations saw the second and
understandably didn't take that option.

And then, yes, you're right that academia must change as well.  Back in
early days the IETF was seen as a place to do research.  Now its seen as
a place to do "real stuff" and many opinions exist that its "not
researchy enough to warrant our participation".

So, yes, I agree: both funding and academia itself needs to change in
order to bring them back in full force (we have light participation now,
but nothing like we had in the past).  The IRTF has greatly helped
improve things lately, IMHO and fortunately.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI