I feel quite alienated myself too.
I was banned from university for writing an email to a bunch of faculty about my research.
That literally happened.
No, the details are not in dispute, @StefanKarpinski wrote in his post that I’m basically correct in what I say, since that’s literally their policy. We are discussing this particular policy. It’s not gossip, it’s a discussion about the policy, which is public information.
A discussion about other people involving details that are not confirmed as being true, which is gossip. You are basically gossiping while proclaiming zero tolerance for gossip in the same post.
No, you are cherrypicking from your original post, which contains quite a few things, including gossip. You did not objectively report on what happened, you added a lot of subjective and emotionally-charged words to it. For instance, you accused
I see no confirmation of that in Stefan’s post. Instead, my take from Stefan’s post is that confidentiality is required for a complaint system despite it being sometimes frustrating. Isn’t it possible that your frustration caused you to confuse benevolent confidentiality for toxic gossip?
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I am assuming that if the stewards find that there is a need for a formal/informal investigation, your side of the case will be heard and you will be contacted for this in due course.
Please do not try to frame the actions of the stewards as “gossip”, they are just doing their job.
I have no reason to assume that you will not be treated fairly, but in the unlikely case you are not, you can always turn to the community again once the process has concluded.
However, at this point involving the rest of us may be premature. Most of us have literally zero information about the whole thing (just to be clear: I am not asking for information here, just stating a fact). Also, please understand that the confidentiality of processes like this is meant to protect all parties, including you. I am not sure I understand why you chose to make it public.
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You are mistaken. The way the policy works is literally built around unverifiable gossip.
Yes, it’s supposed to be confidential, and I am not at all opposed to confidentiality of conflict resolutions, as long as the discussions are evidence based.
What I am opposed to is the unverifiable nature of gossip of which the source cannot be verified.
In the case of this thread, everything is completely verifiable, you are able to question me and see what I wrote and have a discussion about it.
In the context of the conflict resolution policy, regardless of confidentiality, there is no verifiability and also no accountability towards the person who is accusing.
Again, this isn’t so much about my situation, as it is a discussion about the policy. Necessarily, i have to use my situation as an example, since that’s where my own experience comes from.
Just because I draw on my own experience as example doesn’t mean that my own experience is the main topic of this discussion, it’s merely the one experience I can draw from as an example.
I have a completely different impression: most of the examples in Stefan’s post would leave some kind of a verifiable trail, either as posts (which I think can be seen by admins even if deleted/edited), or private messages on this forum (which the recipient can ask the admins to look at).
E-mail messages outside this forum would not be technically verifiable; I am assuming that the stewards would just exercise their discretion here.
I would suggest that, lacking evidence to the contrary, we just assume that stewards are reasonable people who would not base their actions on unverifiable claims.
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If your goal was to have a discussion about the general attitude of the Julia stewardship, my opinion, that I think will be shared by many, is that they come across as polite, patient and constructive.
I get the impression that’s what people are doing, and it’s not reflecting well on you. Your complaints seem vaguely hostile and abstract and, worst of all, not really actionable.
I don’t see what the stewardship should have done differently. As far as I understood, they wrote you privately.
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The politeness of the julia stewardship is not in question, they are of course excellent and polite.
The problem here is that, for example, the julia stewardship could be reading private messages, and decide on their own accord that I made someone feel bad, while the person whom i supposedly made to feel bad actually had no reaction at all.
Therefore, it may as well be that the julia stewardship made up the claim that I offended someone, without the involvement of the person i supposedly offended, because it’s not clear that an offended person even exists, aside from the stewardship snooping in on a private discussion.
It could be they are reading private conversations and deciding on their own accord to get offended on behalf of someone else who isn’t offended.
If the claim was verifiable (yet confidential) this wouldn’t be a likely scenario, but it currently is likely.
That is an extreme and outrageous speculation.
Even if everything you have described (which is actually almost nothing, all empty and vague claims and insults), and even if your speculations turn out to be correct, none of this involves ‘gossip’. which is the spreading of rumours. You are misunderstanding what that word means.
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No, you are mistaken. If they snoop in on messages and discuss amongst themselves their own judgements without the involvement of the supposedly offended party, then they are spreading rumours also in that scenario.
It is frankly ridiculous to entertain this idea even for the sake of argument, but I will anyway.
If someone were to snoop on your private conversations and sanction you for the contents thereof, that would not be based on rumours, but on spying, and would therefore not be gossip.
You have made up your very own private meaning of the word gossip, and you are using it all over the place. It is in conflict even with your own reporting of the events, such as they are.
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I feel that you are just jumping from one unsubstantiated and outlandish accusation to another in this topic.
Ultimately, participating in a discussion forum like this implicitly assumes some level of trust in its moderators. There is a delicate balance between moderation and accountability of the moderators in any online community, but perhaps this discussion has already erred on the side of the latter.
At this point, I would be comfortable with this topic being closed, at the cost of potentially missing some further speculation on the nefarious activities of the Julia stewards.
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So take a deep breath, let it go, and move on my friend.
This feeling is only going to get worse until you are able to get over this and move on.
I too consider the Julia community an important aspect of my life. Heck, I even built a custom PC and slapped a big Julia logo sticker right on the front! For that reason, I am very much able to empathize with you and I’m being very sincere in saying that for your sake, and for the sake of the community that we both care about and appreciate, the best thing you can do is just consider this a bump in the road and keep moving forward.
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Thanks for linking that in, I love looking at it again every time. Just finished my own fileserver-Gitlab instance-numerical work-kitchen sink machine (Ryzen 3600, 64GB ECC RAM), but that’s just a big black box generating heat in my garage and not nearly as cool.
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The overall result here is that making unverifiable accusations leads to nothing but unhealthy speculation.
Looks like they have made my account a “new account”, which limits the number of links I can include in a post to 2 and limits how many posts i can make.
I was told no actions would be taken, yet that was a lie, as my account has been demoted to a “new user” apparently.
Looks like the Julia stewards did this without notifying me and without any justification.
The Julia stewards strike me as very draconian.
I also have the Julia sticker on my laptop, it’s the only sticker would put on there.
I don’t plan on ever participating in any JuliaCon or anything else official JuliaComputing in the future.
JuliaCon 2019 was great, but I dont plan it again.
I don’t think you understand the basic rules of this community. When we signed up for this forum, we consented to play by the rules. Those rules include that anyone can complain about our behavior in this forum: the addressee, a random participant in a thread, someone who just read the thread, and the stewards themselves. That is what the fine print says, and if we didn’t read the fine print, too bad, but the rules still apply.
The stewards have my complete trust that they will be able to discern truth in any such complaint, and act according to the best interests of this community.
There is no point objecting to a censure from the stewards as long as the rules have been observed by the stewards when processing the complaint. Those are the rules.
The only reason an objection could be fruitfully raised is when the rules are not followed by the stewards. There doesn’t seem to be any formal procedure for that, but I believe the stewards would be able to rise to the occasion and engage in some introspection when necessary.
All this whining about being censured will lead nowhere, not for you, not for anyone else.
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Dear @chakravala
Reading this thread makes me a bit sad. I think you do great work in the community, but here I am not sure, what you are fighting for.
Do you know Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research”? I think it contains some nice advise. For example
Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody’s has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
On the other hand, we can’t always give in. There are times when a certain amount of rebellion is sensible. I have observed almost all scientists enjoy a certain amount of twitting the system for the sheer love of it. What it comes down to basically is that you cannot be original in one area without having originality in others. Originality is being different. You can’t be an original scientist without having some other original characteristics. But many a scientist has let his quirks in other places make him pay a far higher price than is necessary for the ego satisfaction he or she gets. I’m not against all ego assertion; I’m against some.
Another fault is anger. Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.
Another thing you should look for is the positive side of things instead of the negative.
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Chakravala, given that you have made this very public, which we take to be a waiver of confidentiality on your end, we are forced to clarify a bit what happened.
There have been multiple independent complaints made to Julia Stewards by different parties about private communications from Chakravala. I will not go into further detail since those people have not waived their confidentiality and we do not want to invite retaliation or escalation of any kind.
Based on the evidence available to the Stewards, Chakravala has violated almost every rule listed in the above post. No further investigation of the complaints has yet been undertaken as we did not wish to open a more formal inquiry or impose sanctions, but we have no reason to disbelieve them. Moreover, several violations of the community standards have taken place in direct communications to members of the Stewards.
After discussion among the Stewards, we decided to send Chakravala a message informally indicating our concerns and requesting that he refrain from these behaviors in the future. The exact body of that message was:
Dear Chakravala
The Julia Stewards list has received multiple independent reports that you have recently been sending hostile direct messages (DMs) on discourse.julialang.org. While it is understandable that many discussion topics can arouse strong feelings, sending unsolicited antagonistic messages to other users is not conducive to the respectful and welcoming environment that we seek to maintain on Julia forums.
After the discussing the matter, the Stewards agreed that it would be best to contact you. We don’t want to escalate this into a formal inquiry, but urge you to refrain from using DMs to send private criticisms or vent frustrations at other users, and in general to avoid initiating unfriendly interactions.
-viral
(On behalf of Julia Stewards)
Chakravala’s subsequent response included the flurry of public posts seen on discourse, some of which were deleted for violating these same guidelines. In consequence of this ongoing situation, the Stewards (as outlined in our published procedures) made a temporary decrease in his trust level on discourse to reduce (but not eliminate) his posting privileges for a short cooling-off period.
The Stewards committee does not seek out cases proactively, but instead responds to complaints from the community. Chakravala, contrary to the viewpoint you seem to hold, you’ll note that you are permitted to continue to post complaints, including this thread. And it is fine to post criticism of the Julia Stewards. However, your continued posts only emphasize the kinds of concerns that have been raised, so consider this a public warning: please be more conscientious in your communications with and about Julia community members; future violations that are brought to the attention of Stewards may result in more consequential action.
—SGJ (on behalf of the the Stewards)
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Then just go ahead and ban me already, if I am apparently so upsetting. Clearly you’ll all be better off without me on this forum.
I have not given a waiver of confidentiality, but go right ahead and break your own corrupt rules.
In the past month I have written a single private message to 1 person, which was @ccoffrin about the usage of admittance matrices, but apparently this is so offensive.
If you need help with admittance and susceptance matrices, I could help you out with that
my Grassmann.jl package can be used for that, except instead of matrices I would use versors and spinors based on geometric product
but I understand you only hire people who are at university, and no university is using these concepts yet, university people still use matrices, so obviously you would only know the matrix way and not any other way
instead of writing that publicly, i said it privately
i’m guessing this must be the message on question, since that is literally the only private message i had the entire month before this incident
the fact that universities generally don’t use these concepts yet is true, is that so controversial?
he certainly didn’t respond to say it makes him uncomfortable, so either it was him or the julia stewards decided on their own that I broke the rules
Sounds more like you are all whining about me.
@jbrea that quote sounds like some kind of arrogant preposterous elitist academic advice
please try to go ahead and prove how i broke every single rule in that private message