The Recurse Center, “a free, self-directed, educational retreat for people who want to get better at programming, whether they’ve been coding for three decades or three months”, has a really interesting set of social rules for participants. They’re interesting because they focus on the subtle-implicit ways one can be a jerk, and these do not get called out often in our society.

##Social rules

No feigning surprise

The first rule means you shouldn’t act surprised when people say they don’t know something. This applies to both technical things (“What?! I can’t believe you don’t know what the stack is!”) and non-technical things (“You don’t know who RMS is?!”). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it’s usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that’s not the intention, it’s almost always the effect. As you’ve probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying “I don’t know” and “I don’t understand.”

Pete - Although I think that there is a good way to communicate this, I certainly agree with the wisdom that it can discourage people from saying they do not know about something. I think people should be able to take pride in their current level of knowledge. It’s not something you should be ashamed of or ridiculed at.

No well-actually’s

A well-actually happens when someone says something that’s almost - but not entirely - correct, and you say, “well, actually…” and then give a minor correction. This is especially annoying when the correction has no bearing on the actual conversation. This doesn’t mean the Recurse Center isn’t about truth-seeking or that we don’t care about being precise. Almost all well-actually’s in our experience are about grandstanding, not truth-seeking. (Thanks to Miguel de Icaza for originally coining the term “well-actually.”)

Pete - I agree that the phrase “well, actually” often puts too much emphasis on the point of mistake. Even though I’ve done this before, thinking that it is in the spirit of making a statement accurate, I’ve also come to understand that there are better ways to say this. I could discuss first whether I agree with the overall message or not, and then add-on some minor factual correction.

No back-seat driving

If you overhear people working through a problem, you shouldn’t intermittently lob advice across the room. This can lead to the “too many cooks” problem, but more important, it can be rude and disruptive to half-participate in a conversation. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t help, offer advice, or join conversations. On the contrary, we encourage all those things. Rather, it just means that when you want to help out or work with others, you should fully engage and not just butt in sporadically.

No subtle -isms

Our last social rule bans subtle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other kinds of bias. This one is different from the rest, because it covers a class of behaviors instead of one very specific pattern.

Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel uncomfortable, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. For example, saying “It’s so easy my grandmother could do it” is a subtle -ism. Like the other three social rules, this one is often accidentally broken. Like the other three, it’s not a big deal to mess up – you just apologize and move on.

If you see a subtle -ism at the Recurse Center, you can point it out to the relevant person, either publicly or privately, or you can ask one of the faculty to say something. After this, we ask that all further discussion move off of public channels. If you are a third party, and you don’t see what could be biased about the comment that was made, feel free to talk to faculty. Please don’t say, “Comment X wasn’t homophobic!” Similarly, please don’t pile on to someone who made a mistake. The “subtle” in “subtle -isms” means that it’s probably not obvious to everyone right away what was wrong with the comment.

We want the Recurse Center to be a space with as little bigotry as possible in it. Therefore, if you see sexism, racism, etc. outside of the Recurse Center, please don’t bring it in. So, for example, please don’t start a discussion of the latest offensive comment from Random Tech Person Y. For many people, especially those who may have spent time in unpleasant environments, these conversations can be very distracting. At the Recurse Center, we want to remove as many distractions as possible so everyone can focus on programming. There are many places in the world to discuss and debate these issues, but there are precious few where people can avoid them. We want the Recurse Center to be one of those places.

Pete - I find the rules outlined here thought provoking. In sum, you can only point out the offensive phrases, but to discuss further or discuss any offensive things in general, you should take this issue off public spaces. The Recurse Center makes a good point that these conversations may be extremely unpleasant for some. This might sound overly strict but there is also another benefit to it: people are more open to learning when they do not feel publicly attacked. Taking this conversation offline helps ensure that you can create an appropriate space for wrongdoer to learn as well.