Prioritize people over society, and revert limitations on safety #211

[fantasai]

Follow-up to the conversation in #244 and #250 (comment) relating to issue 211.

2. Changes "for the good of all humanity" to "for the good of all people" to avoid prioritizing the "good" of a collective over its individuals, which has inspired so much evil in the past and present. See Florian's comment

3. Returns "be secure and respect people's privacy" to a stronger concept of safety for the users. See review comment

4. Returns "for all people" to "for all humanity" (revert from PR#250), since cwilso agrees the original phrasing was more eloquent, and it is no longer awkward due to repetition in item 2.

[fantasai]

Ok, given:

• "All humanity" is the phrasing that was here originally (prior to recent edits attempting to fix 211), and had the consensus of the AB and the VisionTF at least in the past.
• No one, anywhere that I can see, not even in 211, was complaining about it.
• You yourself admitted in Slack that you find rephrasing with "all people" to be less eloquent than the original "all humanity".

... what's your motivation for proposing the change?

(It's not that I have a particular objection to this change, but I'm not seeing the rhetorical benefit.)

[fantasai]

Can you explain what you think this extra phrase adds or clarifies?

[fantasai]

Taking into consideration especially that we already have the first point stated above.

[tantek]

This is exactly the kind of unproductive (and frankly not helpful) wordsmithing that as editors we have asked for folks to please stop suggesting, numerous times for many months.

The linktext on these points was taken from the Statement-approved text (headings) of the Ethical Web Principles.

One of those "good of humanity" used to use the text that said "society" because that's what the Ethical Web Principles says, but we changed that due to strong objections to the word "society" (which I can understand from the specifics noted).

[frivoal]

It seems to me that this pull request would both continue to satisfy those who did not want the word "users" in this context, as well as those (overlapping) who find it problematic to switch from an individual to a collective term in order to solve that first problem. As such, I do find it helpful. There may be other ways to solve the problem, but there is a problem, and to me, this solves it.

Maybe this PR does cause some issues of its own? I don't know. Other than being criticized as "not helpful", no concrete issue has been brought up with it. @cwilso did make some suggestions of tweaks (which to me, are largely neutral, and I'd be happy with the PR being taken with or without them), though it isn't clear to me what those tweaks are intending to address.

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One of those "good of humanity" used to use the text that said "society" because that's what the Ethical Web Principles says, but we changed that due to strong objections to the word "society"

I am one of those who complained about the use of "society". Actually, AFAICT, I am the first one, back in october. If you thought that replacing it with "humanity" would help, then I guess I had not made my concern clear, or that this got lost since. The key thing I stated back then is "Replacing individuals with a collective is not equivalent, and can be used to defend harming the individuals by claiming it is for a greater good." I have elaborated in #211 (comment), so I won't repeat myself here, but I do request you read that comment if you're not sure what the concern is. Humanity is just as much as a collective term than society is. They have different nuances (and some liked humanity more than society), but neither address the core point made above.

go back to literally quoting from the Ethical Web Principles approved text

I do not believe at any point, the document was quoting the Ethical Web Principles, so I'm not sure how we'd go back to it. "for the good of its users" is not in there, nor is "for the good of society" (as @jenstrickland has already pointed out). The Ethical Web Principles does use the word "society" (as well as "users", for that matter), but in different statements than the one being made here.

This is exactly the kind of unproductive (and frankly not helpful) wordsmithing that as editors we have asked for folks to please stop suggesting, numerous times for many months.

To some degree, any change to a document is wordsmithing. But the concern here is not over mild nuance between two synonyms, or subjective preference in style. The concern is substantive. I find it fairly hostile to dismiss substantive feedback from multiple people as a nuisance, and to consider it "frankly not helpful" when said feedback comes with suggested phrasing.

I'm counting 6 people indicating at various points in #211 various levels of support for the notion that replacing "for the good of [individuals]" with "for the good of "[collective]" is problematic.

It's OK to disagree (but then we do not have consensus, not just on this PR, but also on the already merged #250 or #226, since these are all facets of the same issue), and it's OK to ask clarifying questions if explanations given so far fail to make the point clear, but it is not constructive to keep making changes to a contentious section, and to act offended when told that for some, the change brings a new problem. For me at least, changing from from users to society or humanity is a worse problem than the original one.

[msporny]

@tantek wrote:

This is exactly the kind of unproductive (and frankly not helpful) wordsmithing

Yikes, quite a hot take.

Concrete PRs attempting to address issues that are clearly supported by multiple people, with long histories at the W3C for being reasonable voices, are productive endeavors.

I get it that the Editors and a few others are frustrated, but asserting that PRs raised in good faith are unproductive and unhelpful are... well... unproductive and unhelpful.

[cwilso]

This PR addresses at least two, if not three, issues. None of them is the issue this is linked to (#211); in fact, this PR reintroduces an instance of the word "use". I did not feel this PR by itself was a net positive, after assessing what I believe to be the collection of underlying issues; but a lot of the sentiment behind the "unproductive" comment was because we've asked before - since the AC meeting in 2023, at least - file issues first, file separate issues for separate things, and build consensus in issues first. (https://www.w3.org/2023/Talks/ac-slides/vision/#s11-1.)

1. the first change was changing "all people" in the lead point to "all humanity": so @frivoal if you really don't like the use of the word 'humanity' (as you just said in Prioritize people over society, and revert limitations on safety #211 #252 (comment)) you must not have read this PR carefully when you approved it. (And no, I did not understand all collective terms to be anathema; personally, I think making it clear that we SHOULD be trying to improve the collective is important.)
2. the second change was changing the phrase that HAD been "humanity" to "all people". Neither of these changes do I think is adequately described as "prioritizing people over society" - it's literally just swapping two references, and in fact puts the collective term 'humanity' in the lead position now, so if anything I think it's doing the opposite of the claim. In my tweak I suggested keeping "all people" in the lead, would would in fact clearly support both Elika's claimed title (people over society), and Florian's request to not use a collective term (well, as long as we're okay with "all people").
3. The last issue, somewhat confusingly relayed as "revert limitations on safety", was due to a wording change I'd made attempting to remove the aforementioned instance of the word 'use', by relying more closely on the wording we link to in the Ethical Web Principles, upon which this section has always been explicitly based. (If you disagree with that, I can go dig up the receipts, but srsly: I added this section, the points all link to EWP core principles...) It's fair criticism that this might not be perfect wording; fwiw, I'm personally okay reverting but I think "safe to use" seems unbounded (what is it safe for?); thus, I suggested inserting "for all people [to use]" to make it clearly.

I tried, in my suggested tweaks, to a) not use the 'humanity' term that Florian didn't like, b) make a better flow by reiterating "all people" as the unifying basis, and c) follow what I understood of Elika's suggestion that the "safe" point had been made too precise.

Finally, I have full recognition that my last commit (d940f09) touched all three of these lines too: but it was to align with EWP terms, not just individually change references.

[fantasai]

@cwilso This is linked to issue #211 because all of the problems it addresses were a) discussed in #211 and b) caused by the commits intended to fix #211. Wrt your individual points:

1. Nobody was objecting to the use of "humanity" in the first line.
2. Is specifically about addressing Florian's concerns (which I share) about your new wording valuing the collective over the individual.
3. Nobody asked to align with the wording in EWP, or to remove instances of the verb "use".

You're focusing too hard on individual words, and not enough on the phrases in which they are used. The phrases are what raised the objections, not the words.

[cwilso]

Note #255 should result in the same text as this.

[cwilso]

Exact effect obtained by reversion in 2c30ddc and PR #255, so closing.

[csarven]

General comment (and this is certainly not specific to w3c/AB-public or the Vision): If possible, it would be great to see contributors listed in the commit history, e.g., Co-authored-by: [1], as well as in the Acknowledgements section of the document [2].

[1] @cwilso, please don't mind me using this as an example, but if it hadn't been due to repo management, this PR would have gone through, and @fantasai and others would have been listed as co-authors. The same applies to other PRs that went through with co-authors related to this particular topic. I'm aware that these create additional steps, and sometimes we all overlook them, but I think it is a nice gesture within the community.
[2] Perhaps a separate issue could track this?