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Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

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Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off. Are people deliberately ignoring the fact that his guy is mentally ill? You're ascribing neurotypical social requirements to someone who is demonstrably not capable of them, and then acting surprised when he breaches said decorum. >Please don’t use threats here; “I better not see anyone here [any action here]” h…

“I better not see anyone here doing XYZ or else I’ll ABC” is the complete construction of the phrase you use. In parenting, this phrase typically replaces ABC with “punish you”, “hit you”, “spank you”. Your construction buries the implied violence of that phrase by leaving off the “or else”, but that does not resolve the inappropriateness of threatening “or else” on this forum.

I’m glad to see you enjoy policing language as much as Stallman’s detractors. Most would consider it “rude” to invent something out of thin air that was not actually said and ascribe “violence” of intent to it - but, again, seems right in line with this thread.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were. I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt. I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but…

You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources. But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm.…

Thank you!

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#153
post #106
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the nuance of the language as selected. "I am skeptical" clearly prefaces a desire to be made aware of actual scientific evidence, to have the citations (references to the evidence) provided. Further, you, and others who keep beating this dead horse, do not realize that it is part of a larger, ongoing, discussion in which (IIRC from prior HN threads), RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by…

I’ve known people like this, and people who assume that those people are making claims when they are in fact, asking questions, are projecting. Specifically, people who are unable to take questions at face value are often people who are good at using language that is in the form of a question to give commands or state claims (typical in politics for example.) (For anyone that reading, no, my observation here is not m…

What a confusing sentence. Are you saying the people who at mischaracterizing observations as claims are doing so because they are projecting their own positions?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off. Are people deliberately ignoring the fact that his guy is mentally ill? You're ascribing neurotypical social requirements to someone who is demonstrably not capable of them, and then acting surprised when he breaches said decorum. >Please don’t use threats here; “I better not see anyone here [any action here]” h…

“I better not see anyone here doing XYZ or else I’ll ABC” is the complete construction of the phrase you use. In parenting, this phrase typically replaces ABC with “punish you”, “hit you”, “spank you”. Your construction buries the implied violence of that phrase by leaving off the “or else”, but that does not resolve the inappropriateness of threatening “or else” on this forum.

I dunno. I read it as ABC is "call you a hypocrite". I mean it's strong phrasing, but ... your concern seems more of a personal hot-button.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire con…

The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to en…

Logic is great if you want to shoot a canon at the right target or design a circuit. But our current logical tools -- and especially that extremely simple set of 2000+ year old syllogisms designed by Aristotle to help him classify bugs that you're probably referring to when you say logic -- are not even a remotely good tool for analyzing anything that involves humans or society.

Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols.

> Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme.

But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system.

hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data.

And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human".

Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child?

> So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion.

Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all.

Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one.

> If a persons feelings trump logic...

Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false.

And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!"

This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes.

And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data.

Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather young, so I might be exactly the kind of person that you were. I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt. I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but…

You may find, as you age, that this viewpoint takes on nuance. Yes, we should root our world in scientific thinking. We should approach problems logically. We should make our decisions rationally. We should be efficient in how we allocate our resources. But there are times when being human outweighs those interests. There are times when we should be deliberately inefficient because too much efficiency can cause harm.…

But ultimately in those alienating conclusions you were _right_, how do we forget this? What does it make us to disregard uncomfortable truths?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#157
post #34

Umm.... absolutely not. These quotes (directly from his site) beg to differ: > “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.” > “There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing par…

You're missing the nuance of the language as selected. "I am skeptical" clearly prefaces a desire to be made aware of actual scientific evidence, to have the citations (references to the evidence) provided. Further, you, and others who keep beating this dead horse, do not realize that it is part of a larger, ongoing, discussion in which (IIRC from prior HN threads), RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by…

> RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by those who actually discussed the point

Then he should directly comment on all of the statements on the subject he has made over the years [1], particularly since they still exist on his personal website in unedited form, and are easily linked. Honestly, he could easily go back and write an "Updated: I no longer think this because X. I held this idea for a long time because Y."

He hasn't done that. He's free not to do so if he chooses, though I think this is one of the things he needs to shore up if he is to recover his reputation. I had no knowledge of these quotes prior to this incident, and while I still support free software, I will look to other folks for leadership on the topic.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=pedophile+site%3Astallman.or...

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#158
post #63
post #43

Dude has gone out of his way to make other people uncomfortable. I use singular they for my pronouns. He's so bothered by this that he goes out of his way to not only tell me I'm wrong for doing so, but to invent his own language for referring to folks who use gender neutral pronouns (which no one will understand, because it's not widely used). I would certainly question whether I was welcome at an event where he was…

I don't understand why his pronoun scheme is antagonistic. He still respects that you want gender neutral pronouns, he just won't use they because he thinks they has a standard plural meaning. I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept.

It's the general pattern of Stallman going off on some obtuse point and making a mountain of out things you didn't even know were even mole-hills.

It's this exhausting, endless series of crusades against these utterly ridiculous things because of some kind of poorly defined principle.

Like history has decided hundreds of years ago that singular "they" is entirely appropriate, just as singular "you" is in common-use. Language changes. That's why we don't write "ye" any more, mostly because we decided to kick the letter þ (thorn, or "th") to the curb.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#159

Here[0] is a post by someone else who (by his own account) "worked for RMS longer than any other programmer." While he obviously has had a long relationship with Stallman, one of his key takeaways was: "RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because the…

I must admit I didn't know who Mr. Bushnell was, so I looked him up. Finding out about his dismissal from GNU Hurd back in 2003 was quite ironic to me: > RMS has now "dismissed" me as Hurd maintainer because I have publicly spoken against the GFDL, saying that a GNU maintainer must support and speak in favor of GNU policies. If this is really RMS's reason, then it means that he demands the right to control the speech…

Keep in mind that Stallman maintained that Bushnell stopped answering emails for two years, and that was the reason for firing him.

Seems like he still holds a grudge.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#160
post #4

The thing is though, the outrage mob usually doesn't care about facts. Their outrage is always based on the heat of the moment. It even seems this mode has been spilling over into our justice system lately, which is a very unfortunate and a sad state of affairs.

Yes, remember the covington kids? I happened to be with a black guy when it was on reddit and he said that he wanted to "fuck his ass up". WITHOUT TAKING THE TIME TO EXPLORE THE OTHER SIDE. If you point this out to someone who engages in outrage culture, they don't want to hear it, they've already made up their mind.

Face it, the media words things in a way to generate clicks and ratings points, not for accuracy.

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