WisCon: Discussion Methods & Modes Set (3/4): FAIL!

[kate_nepveu]

This panel report is the third of a set; the first panel report was Vigorous Debate, or Verbal Harassment?, and the second was The Body Language of Online Interaction. There is also a fourth post for my general thoughts and for comments spanning more than one panel.

This is a panel I was on, which as usual means that I have notes for what I was planning to say and a couple of scrawled notes from during the panel on things I wanted to return to. This report is therefore a reconstruction—and, sadly, a very incomplete one, because when I first started working on it a week later, I could think of almost nothing specific. Please, please add your own recollections, correct mine, or request clarification.

The not-very-helpful description:

Racefail, Open Source Boob Project… so many ways to fail. How do we keep stepping in it? What is it we're stepping in? How can we avoid stepping in it?
E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman. Molly Aplet, Florian, Rachael Lininger, Kate Nepveu

Early we generally agreed that the panel topic was better thought of as, recognizing that no-one is perfect, how can we keep failing from turning into FAILing?

To make sure everyone was on the same page, we gave thumbnail descriptions of several prominent fails: RaceFail (themed summary by Ann Somerville); the Open Source Boob Project (FeministSF Wiki); SurveyFail (Fanlore); and the Supernatural RPF fic set in Haiti right after the recent earthquake (unfunnybusiness).

Important note: We had meant to do MoonFail, but never did (very short description at FeministSF Wiki; good contextual post with links from K. Tempest Bradford). I think what happened is that Florian mentioned the SPN RPF fic, which wasn't on our initial list, and then Cabell had follow-up questions on that and some other things in the thumbnail descriptions? On the other hand, while the thumbnail description wasn't assigned to me, it didn't occur to me to point out that we'd skipped it, either. Someone eventually asked about it at the very end and I think we all said "oh, yeah, we meant to talk about that!" For me, everything was flowing well on a different focus, so it didn't jump to mind. In any event, we had planned to talk about it, I had wanted to talk about institutional reactions, and at least for me, it was not an intentional omission.

I again referenced my steps from How to Discuss Race and Racism Without Acting Like a Complete Jerk, which I excerpted in the first post of this set so you've seen it already. I also added for this panel, "Don't keep digging." You can go offline, you can reconsider, you can just shut your mouth and disagree with everyone: but STOP.

We talked about bad apologies, which was already covered in the online body language panel, and about Mary Doria Russell and describing nonwhite characters, which had happened the day before (see panel report).

Rachael objected to my using the "step on foot" metaphor when talking about apologies and the irrelevance of intentions, because often the offensive statement isn't accidental as much as negligent; prefers dropping bowling ball metaphor. I said, "that's a really interesting point, I'm going to think about that."

(I have since edited the "How to" post to add this note:

Note: I should also consider whether I was being irresponsibly careless in the way I was walking, or, to be less metaphorical, shooting my mouth off about things I didn't know enough about. But the bare minimum to avoid complete jerkitude is to recognize that if you hurt someone, then that hurt exists whether or not you meant to cause hurt.

I kept the metaphor because I think it makes the last sentence of that very clear, but Rachael is right that it's really important to recognize that "unintentional" still includes many things that are culpable, and I will try to remember to include that in future discussions. Feedback is always welcome.)

Florian brought up appropriating people's identities and experiences, which the panel consensus seemed to be was the area most likely to involve FAIL.

. . . and here is there is a huge gap in my recollection of what we talked about. Many things! The panel seemed to be just the right length! And yet I have no clue what we spent the time on.

Someone asked about MoonFail and organizational responses at the end. People thought it was important for organizations to have statements of principles and policies in place ahead of time, and also to communicate quickly—not necessarily to make decisions quickly, but to say "yes, we hear you, we are seriously considering what you've said."

It was suggested that the slowness of the WisCon concomm's communication after the initial highly-criticized statement [*] may have been partly on legal advice. I can't remember if I said this to the audience member or just before when talking to the panelists about our plans, but: if WisCon's lawyer really did say "you cannot say anything, even that I told you not to say anything," and the concomm followed that advice, then I'm inclined to think that's a bad understanding of the purpose of a lawyer-client relationship, on both sides. WisCon needed to be aware that it had to communicate something to the effect that it had heard people's criticisms and were considering further action, and it needed to tell its lawyer that "this is our need, how can we achieve it?" But then, I admit that I find it hard to imagine what strictly legal principle the lawyer might have been working on, which affects my reaction. (Of course, one of the common failure modes for lawyers is an inability to advise any concrete step unless absolutely forced into it.)

[*] Reconstructing the timeline now, it was 10 days from Moon's initial post to the "we are not rescinding her invitation as GoH" statement, and then a full month to the disinvitation, with no official communication between those times from the concomm that I see on the blogs of WisCon or the parent organization. (There was a resolution passed by the parent organization halfway through that month that Moon's GoH invitation should be rescinded, which was not announced for almost two weeks.)

My notes include a reference to an article someone in the audience recommended, "Why Hawks Win," which was originally posted here but is behind a subscriber wall; a more extensive discussion by the same authors is in this PDF. I, uh, kind of have no idea now why this came up, even after glancing at the introduction.

Sorry, everyone. You can tell I started working on the harassment/debate panel in the Madison airport, but didn't touch this one until a week later.

Comments

[daedala]

"Why Hawks Win" was brought up because it's a paper by one of the founding scientists of behavioral economics. One of the authors, Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel for "prospect theory," a theory of how people actually make decisions (rather than how the Rational Actor is supposed to make decisions). The paper is about how most of the decisionmaking biases we have favor conflict, rather than concession. Basically, it's the cognitive psychology explanation for why fail turns into FAIL, and I felt very stupid for not thinking of it myself.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, right, that was linked to the "waiting for the bus" thing, yeah? (If you've started down a course, like spending time waiting for the bus, you feel invested in that course even if it doesn't make objective sense to stick to it.) Thanks, that makes actual sense now.

[steelrain]

I can't remember if I said this to the audience member or just before when talking to the panelists about our plans, but

I asked you about this in the POC safe-space after the panel; I don't believe the issue came up during the panel.

I, uh, kind of have no idea now why this came up, even after glancing at the introduction.

I brought it up during the panel. Earlier on, there was some discussion on the panel trying to characterize how people go from "screwup" to "FAIL". I suggested that there is often an escalating retaliatory dynamic that reminded me of "Why Hawks Win". I mean, no one goes from screwup to FAIL in one step; there's often a series of bad decisions so I suspect that systemic explanations might be really helpful in understanding how exactly the FAIL comes about.

[daedala]

That was you? Thank you! Seriously, my only excuse for not doing so was that I had just finished a brain-eating course on the topic two days before.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks. I knew I'd talked about it with other panelists ahead of time, and I remembered saying it once after, but I wasn't sure when.

And I shall definitely have to read that now with an eye toward how it fits with common argument patterns.

[kjn]

I'm not sure of this, but I think there may be another angle of the various fails of late: what if they are not problems per se, but rather results of that underlying problems are being made visible or are in some process of resolution[1]?

The internet and increased status and empowerment of disprivileged groups has meant increased interaction between privileged and disprivileged groups. If you make insulting or derogatory comments about someone or a group, but it's only within your circle of peers, then the fails cannot develop. Yes, someone within your circle might call you on it, but there will be little emotion involved. Put another way, you're trading a long-term not really visible attitude problem for a large highly visible short-term conflagration. That is, the fails might be a highly visible negative side effect of a generally positive trend.

Another thing to consider is that a lot of the formally encoded problems has been solved now. Slavery is gone, the Jim Crow laws are gone, there is universal suffrage et c. But many of the social attitudes, or remnants of them, remain. Behaviour among privileged allies that were previously deemed acceptable for "the greater good" suddenly now becomes a problem to address (compare Uncle Tom's Cabin for something that both helped liberate blacks from slavery and reinforced stereotypes about them).

This ties in with the theory I have about a systemic blind spot in liberal thinking, in that it cannot properly address the question of groups - there are only individuals, and "we" and "them" only appears due to external outside structures (ie laws and similar). This made liberals great allies for the early civil rights struggle, but leaves them unequipped to handle the later "civil attitudes struggle".

[1] Note that this does not mean the problem is solved or nearly solved. Solving social problems is often a multi-generational project.