NixOS is electing a committee that will elect the new governing body and design its systems.

One popular proposal is for this committee to consist of five people, of which two are intersectionally marginalized. (That is, marginalized in at least two ways) That is, of course, a quota.

Aaron Hall, who objects to all of this, has arrived.

I value fairness and treating everyone equally regardless of their class status. I would be wary of any statements that make some users feel they will be treated less preferentially to others due to their class status, sowing distrust and conflict.

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It’s a meta comment about distrust and conflict. There has been several comments made on this thread about privileging some people over others. We’re on the internet. Nobody knows who is what class. I suggest we not make those kinds of comments because they are controversial and will lead to arguments and distrust in the broader community if users think they will be treated unfairly because their class is being unprivileged.

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I know everyone looks at statements that privilege some over others and thinks they are sketchy. (In what way are they privileged? How does that work? Does that mean we get suboptimal decision making so that some class-privileged person can have a seat of responsibility and privilege?)

Nix is very cutting edge, and we’d like to see more diversity. Diversity will come with growth. Controversy will stifle growth. These kinds of statements are going to cause controversy and conflict, stifling the growth that will result in diversity. Instead you may be able to rope in tokens of diversity, but you won’t actually achieve real organic diversity because the growth just isn’t there.

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Can you explain what did you put in place to obtain that diversity, can you qualify a bit that diversity? I’m looking at statements like “There was BIPOC”, etc. Also, how did you measure that diversity?

We grew. We advertised on Meetup.com. We let companies know we existed so they could host us. We let colleges know we existed so students could find us. We were open to everyone. We made every effort to help everyone who was trying to help themselves.

One of the things we did that helped: We treated people fairly. We did not talk about elevating anyone with privilege over others because of their class.

Who? Black (native, island, African), White (European, Russian, native (all ethnicities)), Asian (Korean, Chinese), Islanders, Native American, Transgendered, very old, very young. etc.

I’m highlighting this because it’s a reoccurrence of the discussion Jon Ringer kept having in apparent bad faith.

  • @pyrexOP
    9•2 months ago

    My personal opinions. Note that I’m not on the NixOS zulip, or a user of NixOS:

    • Of course some people are going to be excluded from the committee: it’s 5 people.
    • I’ve seen some groups become surprisingly diverse by accident but the groups were generally still run by white men.
    • The minorities in groups I was in usually ended up in positions where they had to do emotional labor or damage control for the white men who made the decisions.
    • The white men in groups I’ve been in usually behaved in ways that, to me, implied massive affinity bias. It was possible to shake them from that without dehumanizing them or being rude, but I had to actually be in the room.
    • That doesn’t make them inherently bad people. Or maybe it kind of does, but only in a conditional sense – that is, if integrating the group they’re in suddenly makes them stop being bad people, then it is a really good idea to do that.

    With regard to this specific proposal:

    • OK, with a quota of 2, you have three seats that white men are allowed to have.
    • If you really need there to be 5 white men, increase the size of the committee to 7. Now you have 5 white male seats, the same as you would if this proposal were not adopted.
    • If this is still objectionable to you, then your apparent problem with the quota system is not that it excludes white men.

    I am possibly being unfair – it seems like what Aaron wants is “there should be 5 people on the committee, not all of them should be white men, but that should happen by accident without needing to be set in stone on the Zulip.”

    This seems vacuous to me: the whole purpose of the Zulip is not to create a selection process – it’s to select a committee one time and then hand over power to that committee. There’s, therefore, little distinction between “deciding to vote for X” and “setting a quota limiting the outcomes.” There is no process external to the Zulip by which an outcome could happen by accident.

    And to say the obvious: I think it’s very unlikely a group consisting of 5 white men would have been selected on merit alone. So I would personally be likely to veto any such group based on that. Saying it’s a quota offers a fig leaf to people with implicitly biased selection criteria – mentally I am saying “of course you picked five fucking clones of yourself. Denied.”