[2021] Friday Facts #366 - The only way to go fast, is to go well!

Originally posted by d40b

First off, thanks for the insights! As a developer myself, fully agree that it's very desirable to be in a place where refactorings are encouraged.

You probably need to be a bit more careful about promoting Uncle Bob though. I believe you probably haven't heard of it yet, but while his teachings certainly have their merits, he as a person is... controversial.Here's one summary but once you start searching there's a lot more to be found.

I know I know, politics and games don't mix well, but promoting a controversial person without any reservations _is_ a political act. So it might be worth considering to add a disclaimer. His actions and words have hurt a lot of (typically) underrepresented people and I'd personally prefer to avoid more people getting hurt by promoting him.

Originally posted by Linaori

Yikes.

Uncle Bob is a racist piece of &*!# and a bigot.

I always had big respect for your development team, but now? You can shove it up your ass yourself.

Originally posted by kablewie

oh, that’s right, how many of your employees AREN’T cis white straight men?

Originally posted by RACK_UP_DOWNVOTES

That's a pretty disappointing response. It's fine to disagree, but I thought as the founder of Factorio, you would have had more tact than that.

Originally posted by ocbaker

Let me talk with the moderators and see if we make an exception for removing comments from Wube employees when they violate the rules, as I see what you are trying to get at.

EDIT: After a discussion, we've decided the rules apply to everyone, even an official person, and we've always had a policy of removing personal attack comments from the subreddit. kovarex's views are visible in his other comments in the chain, no meaningful information has been lost from leaving this comment removed.

Originally posted by cdmistman

or you could just not use ad hominems or other kinds of hostile language when you're on a high horse talking about how you're more rational than people who are trying to tell you that you shouldn't promote somebody who has dismissed rationality. It's that easy.

Originally posted by nckl

I wonder if the developer knew or cared how many trans people actually loved this game. It's got its own cult following. Just f**king flushed on a random Friday morning on a whim.

Originally posted by TRE_ShAdOw_69

Dude, many others including myself looked up to you because of your work practices and how well the game is made.

You're basically digging your own grave by continuing to be hostile towards everyone that's calling you out.

Originally posted by triggerman602

Dude, chill. You're making some really bad PR for yourself and we all know everything on the internet doesn't go away.

Originally posted by Throwaway-whatnow

Typical lol, whine about cancel culture and then complain to the mods that they aren't removing every post you don't like.

Originally posted by cdmistman

I'll leave one recommendation: learn what it actually means to make an argument. Your comment did the following things, none of which were productive to your argument:

• "I made exactly the same mistake as the crowd calling everyone bigot"
  • Hyperbole - you're exaggerating who gets called a bigot, when that's not the case. There are plenty of people not being called bigots, because there are plenty of people that aren't bigots (Uncle Bob is a bigot because he openly talks about his bigotry. There is no reason to believe Brian Kernighan is a bigot because he hasn't said anything I'm aware of that could display bigotry.)
• Provided the definition of a bigot
  • This is good, actually - it means you learned something today :)
• You "safely" claim 99.99% of people are bigots "in one way or another".
  • This is a baseless claim, not founded on any evidence or studies or anything of the sort. You're just making a claim because it makes your "argument" look better (or, rather, it makes your lack of argument seem like an actual argument)

TL;DR: You learned something, but you still have more to learn.

Originally posted by IronCartographer

The problem is that "cancel culture" is a term often used by people that are unaware of their own instances of employing such behavior hypocritically.

Self-awareness is perhaps the most precious thing in this life, and its name is a poor reflection of the necessary component of seeing how we affect others.

Originally posted by triggerman602

How to chill? Put down the phone and go do something else. Get away from this because all you're doing is making things worse.

How is this bad PR? Well you're at the center of a politically charge argument on your developer account making yourself look like a right wing asshole. I pray I don't see an article in a couple days about how the creator of Factorio is a right wing asshole. The things you do and say as kovarex reflect on not only your reputation but Wube's as well. Stop this now because you have nothing to gain from it.

Originally posted by Peglaci

Speaking from my own experience just now, news of this debacle is quickly reaching outside of this subreddit.

Surely you have enough awareness of how the internet works to know that doubling down here is suicide, right or not.

If you don't, well, I really hope your coworkers can reel you in before you do too much damage.

Originally posted by mkyfor

you haven't been arrested my man, free speech's still here. calm the f**k down, you were just being dumb.

Originally posted by Throwaway-whatnow

What is

"So all it takes is to take everything personally, so everything that anyone tells to me and I don't like is personal attack and should be blocked or locked?"

If not whining to the mods?

Originally posted by cdmistman

... i think i understand your semi-coherent statement?

if you have people with beliefes A and B, people from A call Bs bigots because they are attached to B and vice versa

I'm going to assume this was supposed to be "if you have people with beliefs A and B, people from A call Bs bigots because Bs are attached to a belief that is intolerant of A and vice versa"

You are half-correct. There's an inherent difference between being intolerant of what people are vs what people believe. You yourself were talking about how it'd be dangerous to link to Stalin because he believes in Communism, which is inherently violent (I'm going to respect rule 3 here and not try and prove why you're wrong about that). From this statement, you admitted that you believe certain beliefs are dangerous and you would prefer that fewer people held those beliefs because they result in loss of life. This is not covered by the definition of "bigot" that you found earlier - that would require your belief to be unreasonable (I'll ignore the "obstinate" part of the definition because, again, I'm going to respect rule 3 which would violate that). Your belief is fairly reasonable in that all of the evidence you've seen shows a correlation between violence and communism, leading to a reasonable conclusion that communism is violent.

However, things change when you're talking about what people are. Holding the belief that women shouldn't be Senior Software Engineers is bigotry, because that inherently results in loss of life - in some way or another. It could be that your belief results in a woman not getting an SSE position, leading to her stuck in a position where she won't be able to pay for certain medical bills, resulting in her bankruptcy and eventually her descendants might fall into deep poverty (not ridiculous - similar things have historically happened to BIPOC, the biggest and most obvious parallel being slavery). Or maybe it'll be the exclusion of a woman who is actually smarter than you, and she needs an SSE position to gain enough money or influence to create a machine that will cure cancer and nobody will ever have to die from cancer ever again.

The fact of the matter is, it's ok to be intolerant of what people believe if what those people believe is intolerant of what people are. There's a reason why the US and many other countries have laws prohibiting employers from discriminating on the basis of what people are - because discrimination along those lines have been historically proven to be harmful to communities and to humanity. We should do our best to ensure that everyone is tolerant of what people are because otherwise you're making it hard for people to simply exist, and we do not want that to happen.

Originally posted by loldudester

Let's imagine those two groups of people.

Group A says "I hate gay people".

Group B says "I hate people who hate gay people".

These groups are not equivalent. Group A is bigoted.

Originally posted by loldudester

Ah yes these mystical people with their ability to "deplatform" anyone they disagree with at will. Uncle Bob has 160 thousand followers on Twitter. He manages to be heard by many despite being a shitty person. But he's being deplatformed, right?

Cancel culture does not exist. It has no meaningful impact on people who are already in privileged positions.

Originally posted by cdmistman

There is no reasoning for these beliefs because every piece of reasoning has already been debunked. Name an argument that Uncle Bob has made in defense of his beliefs and I'll provide you as many links as you'd like debunking the argument. Every argument in defense of racism, sexism, transphobia, etc has already been debunked because none of them are exactly new.

A common argument in favor of not making a woman president is "women have periods so they can't always make objective decisions." Super easy argument to debunk: humans factor emotions into their decisions constantly, so there isn't a single president in history who hasn't made subjective decisions.

Arguments for not making a woman SSE range anywhere from "because they're dumb" (there's no evidence suggesting women have naturally lower intelligence) to "what if she needs maternity leave" (which is just a shit stance in the first place because studies show babies are more healthy when connected to all parents involved in their home life, and suggesting that men prioritize work over family is suggesting that those men don't develop a strong connection to their child. Also bad because some women are infertile, and fertility status is private and you shouldn't have to share it with your employer??).

Arguments for not making an immigrant SSE range from "those people are taking all of our jobs" (statistically speaking immigrants in America have a poor chance of achieving a high-paying job) to "well we'd need to sponsor their visa" (chances are you already are sponsoring the visa???).

Trans people aren't perverts for changing their gender, nobody is changing their gender to be able to look at children's genitals, nobody is changing their gender to gain a leg up in sports competitions, nobody is trying to convince others to change their gender for the fun of it. They're simply trying to ask people to perceive them how they perceive themselves.

From what I'm familiar with, Uncle Bob's sexism is in how he treats young women - particularly, he tends to attempt intimacy in situations that are inappropriate. This results in women not feeling comfortable in the field anymore, which is what I talked about earlier. It also affirms a common subconscious bias that women are sex objects - didn't somebody murder a bunch of innocent people recently for a related reason?

Arguments for such outdated beliefs and notions have already been debunked, because we have centuries of data backing the conclusions that they are bad.

Originally posted by reik483

In this blog post Uncle Bob argues that thinking women are genetically inferior coders is something people should be allowed to say without consequence. http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/08/09/ThoughtPolice.html

Originally posted by smashmouthultimate

Let's be clear:

Anyone defending American police right now is defending an epidemic of murders against people of color and other minority communities. Putting yourself out there to defend police is directly putting yourself in opposition to the cause "attacking" the police: an effort for accountability and a stop to the violence.

That's why people think it makes him a bad person.

Originally posted by Informal_Computer_94

youre putting this into a very cohesive paragraph just for kovarex, but i dont think he'll ever understand it outside of his bubble of "people are being deplatformed for having different opinions"

its becoming clearer and clearer the longer and longer he continues to go on, that he sees this as nothing more than an irrational reaction to another person having what he thinks is a differing opinion, he will NOT acknowledge bipoc or lgbt people being affected by these "differing opinions", he will NOT acknowledge that supporting the american police is an act of bigotry, its very clear he wont change his mind about it, its very ingrained into his thought process

Originally posted by Schmogel

Hey kovarex, I know you mean no harm to anyone, but I think you should be more careful about the way you communicate. People mistake your disdain of cancel culture for you defending what is being canceled. Two things to consider:

1. Saying bigoted things has to have consequences. Otherwise bigotism spreads. The most efficient way for an average Joe to do something about it is to warn others. /u/d40b did not "cancel" the valuable information Uncle Bob has to offer, he simply asked in a nice way to add a disclaimer that Bob is not the nicest person.

2. Hating on cancel culture is something that's prevalent in right wing circles, mostly because they're upset they can't just say whatever they want without consequences. If you're not careful people will assume you're part of that group.

Originally posted by Informal_Computer_94

i dont think the consequences will be gone by tomorrow, actually, it will persist but those who dont care will have "moved on" by tomorrow morning, but factorio's trans community has been basically betrayed by what kovarex has been saying for the past several hours

Originally posted by nckl

I'm not defending that women shouldn't be senior software engeneers, but if someone would defend that, it doesn't make him a bigot just because he proposes that and have some arguments

That's the literal definition of bigotry. This is so disgusting.

only if those arguments were debunked and the person wouldn't be willing to change his mind, then yes, it sounds like a bigot

What if that person had their arguments debunked, whined about being censored and how the woke mob was coming after them, refused to change their mind, then continually double downed on the original stance? Just because someone believes their justified for being a bigot doesn't mean they're not a bigot. You can't get away from it - to decide if someone's being a bigot, you have to decide if what they're saying is bigoted. You really, really, really don't wanna have that conversation, because you lose.

Saying women shouldn't be senior software engineers is bigoted. It doesn't matter if they believe they're right, of course they do. Like in your definition, the only way someone can be a bigot is if they actually don't believe in bigotry, and they're just lying about it. Which is insane.

And hey kovarex, explain to me why the belief that "women shouldn't be senior software engineers" is incorrect. Because I'm extremely confident that you don't believe that, so you couldn't give an explanation.

Originally posted by nckl

Kovarex explaining how someone isn't a bigot because they don't believe women should be senior engineers is not "keeping things civil". It's "adding heat to the flames" and making it "harder to discuss difficult topics". He should be banned. But I've edited my post.

Originally posted by datameshlearning

You are kidding right? What he's saying isn't civil. "Oh, he's saying we should eat babies but, you know, his tone is fine so it's not a big deal." I really hope you look at your life and realize it's gone wrong somewhere and reflect/reevaluate. This should be a massive learning moment, please use it as such.

Originally posted by nckl

This game was almost a meme because of how many trans people loved it. Like, it's like the go-to game in a lot of queer discords I'm in for whatever reason, for years. It's kinda impossible to describe how out of the blue this is, and like everyone's trying to find the next game to play together. Like again, I know you don't care, but this game has done good for those communities, and could've continued to do good. I can't in good conscious ever recommend this game again knowing people like you profit from it.

As for why? A lot of trans people are programmers (one of a few jobs even possible with very little interaction with other people), and this game appeals to programmers. Maybe there's an overlap with autism with meticulously placing and designing everything, which is more common in queer people. It's a really good game to play without voice chat, which trans-peeps usually try to avoid. It's really easy to just kinda tune out the rest of the lgbt-phobic shitty world and lose yourself in it. It's quiet and non-threatening. It can be played on crappy hardware, and a lot of queer people are broke af. And it's just a well-made game.

While there's nothing wrong with enjoying content made by problematic people (with appropriate disclaimers, which you adamently hate), some people can't get over that, and I can't blame them. I can't think of Bill Cosby without thinking of all the f**ked up shit; like I couldn't watch the Cosby show, it's too distracting. I can't watch uncle Bob's shit thinking of the other stuff he said. If you can, seriously great! There's clearly some useful info there. But understand that others (usually in marginalized groups) sometimes can't. That doesn't make them weaker, that usually just means they've been hurt due to that marginalization. If you want someone to blame, blame the person for being a bigot.

And now in the minds of a lot of people, factorio is forever linked with you, the founder, going on some insane right-wing tyrade in reddit one random Friday morning and refusing to just acknowledge that Uncle Bob is bigoted. It sucks! Every time I launch the game, I just get to be reminded about another bigoted person with power and wealth. I wish you hadn't done this.

Originally posted by nckl

Thanks for your response. I disagree, but I see where you're coming from.

I genuinely wish I could not care. Like I've been called a faggot countless times, as have a lot of people online. But it hurts way, way more when you're queer, especially if they're saying it because you're queer. A couple weeks ago, a player searched my player name, found out I was trans, and spammed "tranny retard" in chat, telling me I'll never be a real woman, that I'm disgusting, etc.. Sometimes they can just tell from my voice.

I remember my mother explaining to me how my gay feelings were a sin back in seventh grade. I remember holding my breath every time conversion therapy was being voted on. I remember in church, the guest pastor (?) railing about how the degenerates and faggots like me are destroying the country, dropping the n bomb, etc.. These are deeply, deeply burned into my brain, and it is impossible for me to not think about them when I'm called that slur.

But this doesn't make me weak - this makes me traumatized. Weak is when you have the choice to do something better, but choose not to. When you could choose not to care about the other person's identity, but make it important. When you could choose to ban the hateful user, but choose not to, because "free speech".

Imagine everyone you interacted with had a button with that they could press to just break your toe. At any time. You don't have this power. You'd probably be really careful with who you interact with, right? You'd probably feel really on edge a lot of the time? Maybe get really emotional when it does happen that you have to live like this?

I understand it can sound like I'm being dramatic, especially when you don't feel this way. That I chose to be this sensitive for political points or something. I'm not, from the deepest part of my heart. I promise you.

Originally posted by RedViperPT

This game also has a huge amount of fans who are right wing, it's extremely popular in eastern europe, russia, etc.

Deal with it.

Originally posted by buwlerman

Maybe he cares more about ideas than people? (A common trait amongst programmers)

It doesn't look like Uncle Bob was brought up because kovarex likes him as a person. He was brought up because kovarex liked some of his ideas. He might not have been mentioned at all if he wasn't the "face" of "clean code" to the extent that he is.

Originally posted by DetachedRedditor

Do you think we should be tolerant of those that are intolerant? Because that is what the linked story seems to promote.
Should you be allowed, without consequence, to voice intolerant opinions, just because free speech?

Because that seems to be the point of the linked story. Robert seems to be a proponent of allowing to voice the opinion that people can be seen as inferior due to their genetics. He seems to think that the only way you can counter this is by (continuously) providing opposing arguments.

Originally posted by Formal-Awareness4771

sure im anarcho just not anarcho capitalist because frankly i believe in a thing called "age of consent"

Originally posted by freetheMonoid

Uh, there's more reasons to not support the police than being an ancap, but the fact that you think that's the only possibility says quite a lot

Originally posted by reik483

What do you think the link contains? What do you think this line means? "His idea was that there’s something biological about short people that predisposes them against operating escalators."

Originally posted by nckl

...Illegal ideas are...

...any bad opinion about the occupants was illegal...

...Should we make it illegal...

Nobody is talking about making it illegal. Why are you always bringing it back to that? Nobody, anywhere here, or basically ever, is making that argument. That's why this isn't censorship.

The person said "Saying bigoted things has to have consequences". They never said that should be "making it illegal". Can you not strawman the hell out of every single person you reply to?

Originally posted by nckl

Trans (queer people in general) are almost always pretty far-left, you're a right-wing bigot, that shit's like water and oil. It's of course not a big deal with you (you will not be hurt financially/arrested) since cancel culture isn't real and there aren't a lot of LGBT+ people, but you've definitely pissed a lot of them off. And again, this game was like, a really big trans game.

Originally posted by de4dchicken

I know the discussion about u/kovarex is probably well covered by now. But it is just not letting me go the past hours to express my feelings. Honestly finding out that he (kovarex) is not giving a damn about marginalized people is a punch in the gut.

I've let go of blindly following seemingly nice companies years ago. But Wube never ever let me down. I was so proud of supporting this team which was immensely pro-consumer at so many places it doesn't have to be. Starting with a lovely crafted weekly blog about what exactly is currently happening in development to multiple patches on the same day. But now I have to open my eyes and ask myself how it is to work under such management. Is he as fierce to his colleagues as he was in this comment section? Is he openly "a-political" at work and is it infkuencing the team and development. And is the Wube team agreeing with him here. I know it's probably hard to speak ill about ur boss but I'd also like to see statements from other people of the Wube team.

These questions will plaque me for a while and every time I think about factorio from now on. It's really frustrating to see the last strain of seemingly nice people founding a company and making money with good practices turn out to be lead by a bigoted person anyway.

I probably have to take a step away from factorio now. Which makes me really sad! It's a damn good game and I love it.

Originally posted by Bloodshot025

Bob has a tendency to fragment an easy to understand routine into a dozen pieces that are hard to put together and call it clean.

https://qntm.org/clean

But with anything, it's possible to find insight in a lot of places, so long as you don't treat it as dogma.