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Re: Banning Norbert Preining from planet.d.o



On donderdag 24 maart 2022 10:50:47 CET Dr. Bas Wijnen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2022 at 05:07:06PM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:
> > On woensdag 23 maart 2022 14:05:57 CET Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> > > ¹ of course correlation is not causation, I am not saying the perceived
> > > growth is happening *because* of the CoC etc.
> > 
> > Indeed. It could also be *in spite of*.
> > There's an equal amount of evidence for that: zero.
> 
> Your post suggests that until causation is proven, correlation should be
> ignored. Why would you think that?

You didn't know how to interpret my statement, so you asked for a 
clarification. Excellent.

> There was an assertion that we are losing lots of contributors because we
> trying too hard to be nice. Instead of going "no they aren't", "yes, they
> are", Antonio got the numbers that can show such an effect.

Antonio's data shows, contrary to what was claimed, that the number of DDs was 
increasing, not decreasing. Excellent.

What those number don't say is *why* and my objection was with singling out a 
single one of them. This is the full(er) statement (also quoted by Antonio):

On woensdag 23 maart 2022 11:40:41 CET Ingo Jürgensmann wrote:
> It became exactly what it tried to prevent by all those initiatives that
> started like 10 years ago, like Code of Conduct etc.

*all those initiatives that started like 10 years ago*
is quite different then singling out one aspect and I think it's incorrect to 
think or imply/suggest there is a single reason for that.

Here are some more correlations:
- The world population has grown
- The number of 'digital natives' has grown tremendously
- Initiatives like Outreachy and GSoC were started
- The Raspberry Pi was launched, giving many people their first experience with 
Linux and Debian (through raspbian)
- Debian GNU/Linux (and other distros) have become better/easier; you no 
longer have to be a 'geek' to be able to use it. So the barrier to entry is 
lower

Those are a number of correlations which seem *plausible* *to me* to have a 
positive effect on the number of DDs. I can name several other correlations 
which seem less plausible and also correlations which I REALLY hope have 
nothing to do with.

> this is how we want to debate among smart people.

Can you help me to see this in line with "Be respectful" and "Assume good 
faith" (item 1 & 2 of CoC), because I'm having a REALLY hard time seeing it in 
that light. I'll "recognize that sometimes people may have a bad day" (from 
item 6 of CoC) and you didn't just call me dumb.

> Even better. To go from there to "those numbers mean nothing at all" is
> nonsense though. They are still the best way we have to check if the
> assertion is true. Even if they don't give a definitive answer, they do
> give an indication. That has value. And the alternative is a fact-free
> opinion war, which has zero value.

Unfortunately you didn't wait for my clarification which you did started to ask 
for, but jumped right into *judging* what you *assumed* I meant.

> Even if they don't give a definitive answer, they do give an indication.

I read this as you do see a *causation* (even though it was explicitly 
mentioned that correlation != causation).
And the reason I responded was to prevent people from doing that.

But I won't do that again. I should've stayed out of the discussion, which I 
will do from now on.

Bye

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