It's a pretty standard anti-inclusivity rant (although it starts by attempting to position itself as more than such), and then ends with an anecdote/strawman (which is contrary to every notion of inclusivity advocacy that I've seen) to propose that those advocating for inclusivity are the real people who want segregation.
I think what a lot of the commenters are missing is that this article, and statements like "If I must revise my teaching to conform to a popular view of inclusivity that I do not share" have an impact on not just his research, but also sends a message to his students: that he doesn't whether they feel safe being there matters, and that they don't deserve to have representation in studied works.
I know a lot of people (mostly white, mostly men) don't think that's true, but these types of attitudes can easily allow harmful messages to fester in academic classrooms. Just because an idea is controversial doesn't mean it's worthy of debate. The idea that we should want more students to feel welcome in academia, and that we should study history and literature that has largely been ignored (or often, deliberately destroyed) is one such idea to many people.
So I know most of the people on this forum will disagree, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization to say that they don't want their name associated with that.
The position in that article isn't a new or particularly interesting idea: it's been rehashed over and over, and studied, and it's an idea that many people have decided is harmful and they don't want to associate with it or people who continue to spread those ideas.
I probably don't have the eloquence to properly convey these thoughts, but there's a whole field out there that cares deeply about these things and has been working on making them better for, literally, centuries. In tech I often see people frustrated that the public doesn't understand what they're talking about when they discuss technologies (see the 5G conspiracy theories!). If you're interested in understanding why many people think doubling down on these ideas that inclusivity is in contradiction to good research/teaching/whatever, there's a whole field of literature out there to read up on that can help explain that. If you're in the US, one decent starting place is the history of black people in the US, and the history of women in the US. I've heard really good things about this series, for example: http://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/
I know a lot of people (mostly white, mostly men) don't think that's true, but these types of attitudes can easily allow harmful messages to fester in academic classrooms.
> 88 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that “the climate on my campus prevents students/faculty from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Sixty-three percent of faculty agreed or strongly agreed with the same statement.
No, it's not mostly white men, 88% is a figure large enough that it necessarily includes large swathes of other demographics.
The question in that survey is different: it asks whether people self-censor because of others. That's pretty different than whether inclusivity is a worthwhile goal, and surveys are notoriously variable based on wording. For example, I would answer yes to that question, I censor myself to avoid offending people (I have done so in this thread, to try to keep it constructive), but I strongly support work to make colleges and workplaces more inclusive places.
It didn't just ask about censoring specific words or terms, or staying polite. It asked about censoring beliefs.
Say someone who is very much in favor of legal abortion stays silent as one of their co-workers goes on about how abortion should be banned, for fear of offending said co-worker. Is the fact that this person held back from sharing their beliefs an example of inclusivity? I'd say that this is not only false, it is the opposite of what is true. The fact that this person self-censored out of fear of causing offense is evidence of an environment intolerant of pro-choice people.
Inclusivity is a worthwhile goal. That is why such extensive self-censoring beliefs is a prominent concern, it's strong evidence that we are not being inclusive of people of different beliefs.
> I think what a lot of the commenters are missing is that this article, and statements like "If I must revise my teaching to conform to a popular view of inclusivity that I do not share" have an impact on not just his research, but also sends a message to his students: that he doesn't whether they feel safe being there matters, and that they don't deserve to have representation in studied works.
You're making a jump there: from whether Kunin's class covers works from authors with certain demographics, to whether his students feel safe. The character sequence "saf" doesn't appear in either of Kunin's articles. I think if it had been conveyed to him that his students' feeling of safety depends on his choice of curriculum, then he would have mentioned this argument (he'd probably call it absurd but I expect he'd mention it). His impression was: "That way, students from underrepresented minority communities will see themselves reflected in the readings. The students will feel included, and empowered to succeed, when they read works by writers who look like them."
Do you think it's really true that a significant number of students were feeling unsafe as a result of curriculum choices, and if so, why hadn't Kunin heard of it?
I might be making a jump, because I've followed a lot of these discussions over time.
To my understanding (and as a disclaimer, I advocate strongly for it), "inclusivity" in general means making an environment safe for people of marginalized backgrounds. So to me, his declaration that inclusivity as a value ought to be up for debate seems to indicate he doesn't think it's a top priority that students of marginalized backgrounds feel welcome in his classroom.
Is that a jump? A bit, but it's based on seeing similar situations play out in other areas.
But the choice of curriculum was to my second point: I think students deserve the chance to study a wide variety of history and literary viewpoints, including when feasible some from backgrounds similar to theirs. There has been tons of literature written by black authors, written by women, written by LGBTQ folx. Often times those works have been, in the past, deliberately destroyed (like the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) or not considered for publication (George Elliot choosing a pseudonym to publish outside romance), which is a significant component to why there are so many more white men authors historically.
If you teach a course where all the literature you choose is from white men, you really limit what history you are teaching, and you can subtly reinforce that others may not be welcome to succeed in literature. Inclusivity asks us to consider those implications and pick some variety of authors--there are many great writers of so many different backgrounds to choose from.
I think what the parent poster is getting at is that many of us are bewildered at the way you are using the word “safe”.
I take it you aren’t saying that students believe that an assailant will be hiding in the classroom with a bat ready to assault them as the enter the classroom.
Rather I take you and others to be using safe to mean something like comfortable. But unsafe and uncomfortable are two different words. There’s rarely or never good cause to make someone feel unsafe, but sometimes being uncomfortable can lead to growth. Or at least people used to believe so.
I mean psychological safety, as in https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/after-years-of-research-go... , or as in "will i face verbal bullying in this space". That is a different type of safety than physical safety, but it's very real. How much people experience not feeling psychologically safe varies widely, though.
I'm a visible minority, and my rights are frequently a part of political debate. In spaces where those debates are allowed to happen, it's often not safe for me to participate. It's a hard feeling to describe or put into words for someone who hasn't experienced others saying that they shouldn't be allowed to do participate in some aspects of society because of a characteristic they can't change.
> In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.
Well. What happened when Kunin took a risk and published an essay asking some questions and offering what he thought was a new idea? He faced verbal bullying and was punished. Is the point to give psychological safety to minority students but not bother about other people? (In fact, I suspect many of the minority students who happen to agree with Kunin would not feel psychologically safe saying so.)
At this point the classic rejoinder would be to say "look at these suffering minorities; your argument is invalid" or to talk about Kunin's privilege, but you seem to make better arguments than that.
> So to me, his declaration that inclusivity as a value ought to be up for debate seems to indicate he doesn't think it's a top priority that students of marginalized backgrounds feel welcome in his classroom.
Well, Kunin says: "My sense is that students and faculty are unsure of the meaning of inclusive teaching. To the extent that we feel any certainty, we do not agree with one another." I don't think he ever says that he thinks inclusivity, the way he interprets it, is a bad thing or isn't worthwhile.
Is that a distinction without a difference? Suppose, for illustration, that I declare that "inclusivity" means everyone has to sit in a circle for the whole class, because otherwise some people won't be seen by others and therefore won't be properly included in the classroom experience. Kunin protests that this would make it impossible for him to write on a chalkboard or project an image onto a screen. I tell everyone that this means Kunin opposes inclusivity, and the minority students start to feel unsafe. Is this Kunin's fault, or mine? Is the solution for Kunin to buckle up, or for me to stop scaring the students?
If you think that's a silly idea, consider this: "Last year when I proposed to teach a seminar in which the syllabus would include essays by Ralph Ellison, two of my colleagues wrote to the Curriculum Committee, as well as to the dean and the president of the college, objecting that it would be “literary blackface” for me to study Ellison." (The more general term "cultural appropriation" could be used if Ellison were a non-black minority.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone had actually proposed sitting in a circle.
Is there some source of truth, that all responsible people should obviously recognize as the source of truth, about what is the ideal "inclusivity"? If it were a serious attempt at "making an environment safe for people of marginalized backgrounds", then one thing I would expect to see is for these recommendations to be backed by studies; is that usually the case?
Also, by the way, receiving a failing grade on a test is probably very distressing to many people (perhaps a majority), and failing a class even more so. Surely making students feel "safe", at this level, would imply eliminating the possibility of such distress and making sure the students knew it was gone?
"but also sends a message to his students: that he doesn't whether they feel safe being there matters, "
That is some very serious gaslighting.
To suggest that somehow students would be 'unsafe' around writers such as him or his works, is a toxic form of rhetoric.
That term - 'unsafe' - used in in an intellectual context such as it is is anti-intellectual and oppressive.
There is no 'harm' in his words.
Even if the publication felt it wasn't exactly perfect - they could have published it anyhow at very least on the basis of erring in the side of expression.
Then people cold read it, make up their own minds, disagree, not care, whatever. We're adults, we can do that, that's the point.
And FYI nobody is arguing that any real, material history should not be taught.
> And FYI nobody is arguing that any real, material history should not be taught.
This is in the context of his literature courses. There are so many literary authors that aren't white men, that arguing that he should have the right to decide to only teach works from white men (if he deems them to be the best works), does seem to me like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people.
If you only mean non-literary history, the history of black people and LGBTQ people are both very under-taught in United States schools. That's a real thing that some people do want to continue, and argue for. (But this seems a bit outside the topic at hand)
> There are so many literary authors that aren't white men, that arguing that he should have the right to decide to only teach works from white men (if he deems them to be the best works), does seem to me like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people.
No, it does not remotely seem like arguing that we shouldn't teach the history of marginalized people. How do you go from "I should be able to decide to only teach works from white men" to "other people shouldn't teach anyone other than white men"? To go from "I should be allowed to _____" to "nobody should do anything except ______" is a massive leap.
A course in classics is going to have overwhelmingly male authors, likely exclusively so. The reality of the ancient Mediterranean was that patriarchy was extensive, and women were not afforded the opportunity to contribute in that space. This is in now way saying that other courses in other fields should feature women or minority authors.
That's fair. I should have said he's arguing for the right to not teach the history of marginalized people, not that he's arguing that others shouldn't (though he does seem to be arguing that others should be allowed to not teach it).
As I read it, he's arguing for the right not to have to choose what literature to teach on the basis of whether it came from marginalized people. He wants to teach the best literature, not black literature or brown literature or white literature.
I mean, if you were teaching physics, you wouldn't teach ideas based on what race or nationality the person was who came up with the idea. I know, literature is different - it's more subjective, it's not empirically verifiable to determine the quality. Still, the desire to pick the best books based on the content of the books rather than the race of the author does not seem to me to be that horrible of an idea.
"I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." And let books be judged not by the color of their author's skin, but by their content.
> A course in classics is going to have overwhelmingly male authors, likely exclusively so.
Not of necessity; there are plenty of known women writers of the period (it's hard to imagine a broad survey excluding Sappho, but she's far from the only example.)
> The reality of the ancient Mediterranean was that patriarchy was extensive.
Perhaps, but also much less so than in the exclusively male, until very recently, academic society which did so much to shape the lens through which we see the classics.
Does the Chicago Review position itself as an academic organization? I'm under the impression it's a literary publication, which seems pretty different than a research publication in my lay eyes.
I have tried using wlroots, it's very hard. If you had to build your own compositor Mutter is far easier (it provides a GUI toolkit and all you need graphic wise). QTWayland is very nice too but won't get you far outside embedded uses (no xdg portals, no screen capture, etc.)
WayFire makes wlroots a bit easier but I find it quite messy/not clear (but it's very powerful & flexible).
There's definitively the need for an easy high level API for wlroots (the main wlroots dev started working on a high level scene tree API some times ago but it now seems kinda abandoned)
1. It often happens that the main repo offers a new kernel, but the corresponding module is not ready on obs yet. This means upgrading to the latest rolling release cannot just happen at any time, but requires careful planning. This is a big inconvenience.
2. In the past dracut sometimes just failed to pick up the module for the initrd, causing a boot failure at the next system start. I could not figure out why, however this never happened with the first class supported ext/xfs.
3. The distro's boot/rescue media do not contain the driver. This means a third-party boot medium is required to go into a broken system, and repairing it when chroot is involved is now much more complicated because of the different distro.
btrfs was a really underutilized filesystem. It still has some superior features to zfs (such as offline deduplication), but the momentum now is clearly with zfs.
It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years.
That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.
Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems unrealistic simply on the basis that most people in FOSS never met Stallman. (On the same basis, I would actually be inclined to believe that he has probably inspired more women specifically than he has alienated, too.)
Note also that all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago, and we seem to be supposed to conclude that the pattern never stopped on the basis of that and a pathologically misquoted and misrepresented email he sent on the Epstein/Minsky case. Considering that the real email is at most slightly tone-deaf, the most likely model of reality to me seems to be that he has fixed that behaviour well over a decade ago, but a number of activists had resolved to never let it go until they found some way to completely destroy any status and reputation he has.
That's an interesting way of framing it—I expect that no, he hasn't directly dissuaded more people than he's encouraged.
But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.
As another commenter pointed out, I also don't think net impact is the bar. But besides that, it's very hard to measure, so I prefer to focus on having positive impacts and limiting/fixing negative impacts. I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
> But I expect that the second- and third-degree network effects have. MIT has had a huge influence on open source software. Keeping the number of women who contribute to FOSS lower has a snowball effect of discouraging other women from contributing—there are fewer leaders to look up to, and day-to-day misogyny in FOSS spaces goes unchecked more often.
Surely second- and third-degree network effects occur on the encouragement side of the equation, too. Why would we expect any putative discouragement of women by Stallman to travel further in the social graph than his encouragement of both men and women?
> I think the things he said on the CSAIL mailing list continue to contribute to a negative environment for women at MIT.
I think the negative effects spread further because they skew the field more. I think women are more likely to avoid FOSS because there are few women, even without knowing who RMS is, than men are likely to go into FOSS because of RMS or someone who was inspired by RMS. That's an assumption on my part, but I think making tech more equitable for all people is a worthy goal in itself, even if that doesn't increase the total number of contributors.
> Which things specifically, and in what way?
Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim.
The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims.
Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT.
> implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim.
...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case) that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other) assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm someone against their will.
Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams from somewhere at one point in hindsight.
> The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre
> Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT
How would Minsky have known? It was 2001 or early 2002, before Epstein's trafficking came to light. From Minsky's point of view, a girl who worked at Epstein's retreat as a masseuse and was above the age of consent [1] offered to have sex with him. (Which, according to Gregory Benford, who was there, Minsky declined).
[1] 16. It wasn't until later that the US Virgin Islands raised it to the current 18.
> Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it?
Almost certainly not, but at this stage it is not unlikely that he'll put off more than he'll encourage going forward. So by the same "net effect" argument you make for accepting his behaviour up to a point in the recent past, he should go. Live by the sword, get asked to resign because of the sword.
> Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors
That low number of female contributors is at least in part due to the impression people have of working in these areas. Allowing him to continue to alienate people works against efforts to rectify that impression (and where it is true rather than just an impression, work to fix the behaviours that are causing the problem).
> all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago
Perhaps most, but not all. I've definitely seen some more recent claims, and they were mentioned before this particular episode. They weren't as egregious as the earlier behaviour so he was at least controlling/curbing/changing the creepy behaviour for which I suppose there should be some credit, and there is definitely some curious timing wrt MIT and the Epstein contributions so there is presumably a bit of "throw him under the bus as a distraction" going on, meaning this is a case with significant grey areas, but I think painting him as an entirely innocent victim is a step too far.
Let's be fair handed: if we wouldn't accept it from a politician or other celebrity, we shouldn't accept it from someone whose other ideas we agree with either.
You are okay forgiving people as long as their "net impact" is positive? Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before ?
In general, yes. Murder is a very peculiar case that is hardly suitable to be the benchmark for building our intuitions about trading off harm in general: human lives are not fungible, murder is not reversible, the victims do not generally get a meaningful way of influencing how the murder impacts them etc., all properties that do not apply in the case of being put off a pursuit like FOSS. (Even then, we're sometimes okay accepting murder to save more lives: e.g. the Allies' actions in WWII are considered a heroic even with nearly a century of historical distance) Arguably, the progressive argument for {affirmative action, inverted burden of proof in Title IX, ...} also amounts to "accept some harm if the net impact is positive"; few people claim that these policies will not result in some people being rejected from positions they deserve or punished for crimes they did not commit.
Some countries are more explicit about this and actually constitutionally single out matters of life and death as being prohibited from being traded off against each other (e.g. Germany), i.e. the state is not allowed to play in trolley problems. The corollary is that the state, and most everyone, finds it okay to trade off other harms: you can for instance choose to build an airport that will drive down the value of some people's homes and expose them to considerable noise in order to give convenience and good business to a large number of people. I think discouraging some women from participating in FOSS is much closer in quality of harm to "your home is now worth half as much and you have to put up with the noise of planes flying overhead everyday" than "you die a painful and untimely death".
> Also notice how it is almost always okay for "women" to be discouraged and counted as collateral damage.
Quote one person in this thread who said that it wouldn't be ok if it affected men instead. Or just one person implying that.
You're assuming a lot here. If anything, I think it's likely less people would care if a bunch of men were alienated, since there's already so many of them in the field in the first palce.
> "women" to be discouraged and counted as collateral damage
this never happened though.
According not to me, but to Thomas Lord (if you don't know who he is, go and check)
> One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
Wow I've seen everything on HN to protect RMS. The Allies action was to counter gratuitous aggression and persecution of large swathes of people. Are you telling me RMS has had the same experiences in his life to warrant his egregious behavior ?
I don't think my leap from murder to war was greater than your leap from some gauche remarks during a talk in the '90s and a handful of emails lawyering about word choice that might have put some people off working in the speaker's discipline to murder. Other than that, what exactly is your point? At no point did I imply that rms's life history should be compared to the Allied intervention in Europe; I merely brought it up as as an example that proves there is no such thing as a universally accepted rule against trading off murders and people saved.
("Wow, I've seen everything on HN to attack RMS. (...)")
Can you explain, in general, how armies and war are ethically relevant to Richard Stallman threatening coworkers to kill himself if they don't go on dates with him, or asking them to lay down topless on a mattress in his office?
There is one: (1) let Stallman keep his position and inspire/encourage one set of people, while discouraging/putting off another; (2) remove Stallman from his position, foregoing both the inspiration/encouragement and the discouragement/putting off.
That wasn't really the question, though. There was nothing there about saving lives _by_ murdering someone. It's more like "is it ok do do bad things if you've built up good karma beforehand by doing more good stuff".
It is not the Trolley Problem because the literal question is "Is it okay for someone to murder a person if they saved more than one life before?" and that is not the Trolley Problem, that is the "letting someone off the hook for present and future misdeeds based on past good acts."
That's not a good analogy because murder are both one time actions. Punishing a murderer who saved before doesn't prevent more people from being saved. A more apt example would be granting clemency to a highly talented surgeon specialized in an operation nobody else can do.
> Where is the crime here?
The analogy is between a good thing not cancelling out a bad thing. The police are not involved. There isn't a crime. He has been pressured for making people very uncomfortable in pursuit of his sexual interests, which is a perfectly good reason to reprieve someone.
He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
> He has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
Who, exactly?
> -Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
> -Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
Sooooo, your entire analysis is based on legends circulating since the 90s about a weird man who was even told to be scared by plants?
For reference, Thomas Lord, creator of GNU arch (think about Git before Git), who worked for FSF for a long time said
One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.
p.s.: In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away **OF COURSE** and he usually had helpful criticism and advice of our efforts, from my point of view.
> -Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Can you tell an inside joke when you see one?
p.s. all of us have being young and done some innocent stupid shit, the kinds young people do, like having stupid signs on the door. It doesn't make any of us a criminal.
> your narrative of sexism in the software industry being a mostly made-up issue
Is this what this is all about? Stallman has approximately 0 sway in the "software industry".
I'm sure it is a real problem, but Stallman is neither the cause nor the solution to it. I would look into how paying high salaries for unethical work would attract abusive people, and one shouldn't want to work in those industries in the first place.
Do you mean to say that your analogy is relevant to the claims against RMS being partly or completely dismissed as a "necessary evil" comparable to shooting a person who's on a killing spree, when weighted against his contributions?
I'm just asking. I got that feeling reading your comment. I get that feeling reading a lot of comments here. I could be wrong.
As a reminder, he has been accused, by several independent parties, of, among other things:
-Asking female coworkers to lay down topless on a mattress in his office.
-Threatening a colleague to kill himself if he/she didn't go on a date with him.
-Posting up signs in his workplace along the lines of "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)".
Don't be obtuse, I said murder, not kill. Of course there are some justified instances of killing.
Again, if you save a bunch of lives, but then murder someone in cold blood, does the fact that you saved way more than you murdered mean that society ought to look past the murder? After all, your net contribution is very positive!
Pretty much. I think I've seen one of his speeches this year for the first time, yet his ideas hugely changed my life forever, since I understood them. My exposure was just reading some texts onf fsf website in 2003, and jumping into learning GNU/Linux back then.
I agree with you about all the past bad behaviour, but the e-mail about Minsky was a bad choice to be the "last straw". It was an email calling for accusation-inflation prevention, which the media portrayed as completely the opposite (and this way of manipulation information from the media should be criminal, in my opinion).
That's similar to how "free speech"* works in Germany, and you have people like crowder saying in public that "Germany has no free speech".
I agree in principle, but I think there's lots of good arguments against it as well.
More importantly than the question of whether it's legal, I'm amazed that people can still see themselves as "the good ones" after all the things they do to their fellow humans.
* In German, we use the word "Meinungsfreiheit", which literally translates to "Freedom of Opinion", not "Free Speech", so yes, technically speaking, we don't have free speech; only the right to express our opinions.
Sounds non-insane. Opinions should indeedbe free. Facts should be free. Lies that harm should not be OK.
A nice side effect of criminalizing defamation would be that the enforcment would be up to the state. When it is a civil affair only rich people can defend themselves.
It would be horrifying to have meticulously documented notes on every thing you ever said that may or may not be true, and may or may not have been a joke. If his career had been a comedian and not a FOSS advocate, then would he still be crucified for saying the same things or would he simply be an awful comedian?
I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
If there are people who are choosing to make it incumbent upon themselves to take down these "problematic" individuals, then it must be because they think that all of the systems that have allowed a person to continue to exist despite those opinions must be unreliable in adequately judging them. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be more practical to fix the endemic problem rather than destroy a single person? I'm guessing that the latter is just easier to do and more profitable as well. You gain "credibility" by attacking someone else, so it's difficult to believe that they are doing it for altruistic means.
All in all, I'm pretty sick of this nonsense. A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in, not to mention the already authoritarian governments doing the same.
Honestly, I think we let a lot of mean-spiritedness pass as "comedy", and I think sexist comedy causes a lot of real-world problems.
> I would be dollars to doughnuts that the author of that site and the editors of that "wiki" have made or thought worse things at some point, but because they have not reached a certain level of celebrity, there's no dossier on them. It's truly ridiculous to me the amount of effort spent on trying to claw others down.
"With great power, comes great responsibility." When operating in contexts where you have a lot of power, one has to be more careful with their words and actions. If he had voiced that opinion to a friend of his, no one would have complained. But voicing his opinion minimizing rape on a university mailing list has direct negative effects for a lot of people.
Also, some people do listen, apologize, and put in the work to learn.
> I accept that inequality exists and perhaps RMS has some awful opinions, but if that's the case then just ignore him.
The problem is that other people don't just ignore him. By ignoring his harmful behaviour, we let his negative impact spread further as others repeat his misogynistic ideas.
> A world where everyone is constantly being watched by eachother and reported on is already too authoritarian for me to want to continue living in
I'm sorry and hope you find a way to continue living in this world. And I agree strongly about authoritarian governments.
I don't really think calling out a post on a large mailing list counts as "everyone is constantly being watched by each other" though.
> on a university mailing list has direct negative effects for a lot of people.
That very mailing list was about to arbitrarily accuse a dead innocent man of a crime to help provide cover for actual criminals still walking the halls at MIT.
This charade around Stallman is an injustice against Epstein's victims, the decent people at MIT, and Minsky.
I can find nothing that meets this criteria in the above links. Do you have an unusual definition of "misogynistic", were you being rhetorical or do you have another source?
(note: there are many more archives. This also gives you an idea of the effort it must have taken to find those few "damning" posts, and to skew those out of context)
> In 1993, he asked for birth announcements to be banned from emacs mailing list, unless they are announcements for seahorses, because then it would be the male that gives birth and therefore interesting.
I feel like that is pretty sensationalized. The argument being made there is that regular birth is a common thing, and should be left off the list unless it is something out of the ordinary.
Selam G. builds weapons for US Department of Defense...
That's not really feminist, isn't it?
> • Co-Principle Investigator for a U.S. Department of Defense SBIR Phase II research contract, prototyping autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) with collection system.
What kind of women and does anyone else find it sexist to assume that men will always be the offenders and women the offendees? Programming involves deconstructing complex problems into basic steps while ignoring full real world nuances in order to derive a reasonable abstraction. Like... deconstructing allegations against Minsky into basic aspect (instructed to have sex vs actually had sex, aware of lack of consent or not, aware of age or not, 16 can consent in jurisdiction X year Y or not). Successful programmers trend not super socially aware and often on autism spectrum. So maybe women genuinely interesting in programming would be like Ada Lovelace, a compulsive gambler with messy love life who dreamed of building a computer to beat poker? How long would she last in 2019 MIT?
And if you get alienated from a career path because of one bad professor, go and find something else that you want so badly that you are willing to tough it out. Otherwise you will always blame your professional success limits on people not supporting you enough, or cracking an off-color joke or two or microaggressions. Do you honestly expect to never have to deal with a problem boss/coworkers/customer in a super-competitive private sector job? Don't tell me nurses and schoolteachers never have to deal with someone like RMS or worse. And sure, some degree of bad behavior should have proportional consequences, but do we hear about how women get alienated from these professions en masse?
Some people are sympathetic for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with some cult of celebrity, like being generally fed up with shitty, hypocritical puritanical BS out in the world generally.
That would include me, which is why I'm speaking up: Your comment smears me, though I'm sure you didn't think you were talking about me.
Otherwise, I wouldn't have said anything. I think rehashing this instead of actually discussing the ideas he wrote about is just more disrespectful BS and I hate seeing it.
So hang on, you're happy to say that you are leaping to his defence because you're sick of some abstract concept against which you rally rather than the facts of the case himself?
There is nothing whatsoever abstract about the things I'm tired of.
This is neither the time nor place to rehash my criticisms. It wouldn't do any good anyway.
My previous comment was For the record. I don't intend to hash it out with you further in this thread.
It’s really good at highly dynamic/interactive apps, such as browser versions of asana or slack, or other things where user actions are small but frequent. If you aren’t doing full page reloads and have a lot of changes, it’s much simpler than managing each individual state change in vanilla javascript.
I personally think React’s component model is much nicer than any templating system I’ve used as it supports composition as a first-class feature.
And if done well, yes you get better performance on the frontend. (If done poorly, you don’t.)
Unfortunately, React's been around long enough now that there is legacy code that was NOT done well at all. I unfortunately inherited a project recently that was so convoluted and over-engineered, it took me like 30 minutes just to figure out how to change the logo in the top navbar. I could have done that with a Rails layout or header partial in about 30 seconds!
I turned slack into a chrome “shortcut” (which seems to be a PWA minus the service worker), which lets it run in chrome instead of a separate electron instance, but also have a separate app window.
Ive also found having slack be ~another chrome tab, instead of a copy of chrome via electron, to be really nice
I would strongly consider leaving if my manager decreed that I mustn’t use vim and must instead use webstorm/atom/whatever (especially if not in vim mode).
I’ve spent a lot of time setting up my dev environment so it works well for me, and I’m more productive and happy in it.
Style/formatting consistency is one thing, but editor uniformity is an unrelated thing. Yes, it makes collaborating easier, but is that worth the cost of people being less happy or less productive?
I don’t dislike other editors, but I like my setup a lot, and there are, imo, pretty huge switching costs involved in switching to/from vim/emacs and a GUI editor.
There is definitely a use case here, but there is a difference between making threads readable for sharing outside of twitter, and adding ads or reselling content. (And in the original case, I think it's still reasonable for content creators to dislike their work being taken outside where they have less control of it.)
In some of the follow-ups there are some more ethical compilers: https://bobbin.herokuapp.com/ stores nothing and uses twitter's embed functionality to link them together, and https://threader.app/ doesn't monetize content and is working to get better at supporting creators.
2) They're different because they usually store and distribute her data somewhere other than twitter. If she deletes a thread, that copy persists. If people interact with that copy, she doesn't get to see or manage that. If it's through twitter's API, she can see interaction with her content and block people if they interact abusively. And third party clients generally don't profit off of individual threads.
https://bobbin.herokuapp.com/ is a compiler that is much more like a third party client; it all goes through twitter's API, and in follow ups she said it sounds fine.
She used to get requests to turn her threads into blog posts; now she does not.
Also, she didn’t seem to necessarily want money from them, but somewhat similarly to GPL’d open source projects, doesn’t like scrapers making money off of her work. Plenty of software devs license their work similarly to that as well, and it sounds reasonable to me.
I think what a lot of the commenters are missing is that this article, and statements like "If I must revise my teaching to conform to a popular view of inclusivity that I do not share" have an impact on not just his research, but also sends a message to his students: that he doesn't whether they feel safe being there matters, and that they don't deserve to have representation in studied works.
I know a lot of people (mostly white, mostly men) don't think that's true, but these types of attitudes can easily allow harmful messages to fester in academic classrooms. Just because an idea is controversial doesn't mean it's worthy of debate. The idea that we should want more students to feel welcome in academia, and that we should study history and literature that has largely been ignored (or often, deliberately destroyed) is one such idea to many people.
So I know most of the people on this forum will disagree, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for an organization to say that they don't want their name associated with that.
The position in that article isn't a new or particularly interesting idea: it's been rehashed over and over, and studied, and it's an idea that many people have decided is harmful and they don't want to associate with it or people who continue to spread those ideas.
I probably don't have the eloquence to properly convey these thoughts, but there's a whole field out there that cares deeply about these things and has been working on making them better for, literally, centuries. In tech I often see people frustrated that the public doesn't understand what they're talking about when they discuss technologies (see the 5G conspiracy theories!). If you're interested in understanding why many people think doubling down on these ideas that inclusivity is in contradiction to good research/teaching/whatever, there's a whole field of literature out there to read up on that can help explain that. If you're in the US, one decent starting place is the history of black people in the US, and the history of women in the US. I've heard really good things about this series, for example: http://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white/