[deleted]
Apology
131–140 of 282 posts
Re: Apology
#132I thought that was a good apology and I hope that it gives Matthew closure and a peaceful heart over this whole thing.
I have been, as an outsider, a fan of the Racket ecosystem. I hope that this ends up making a stronger community. I certainly enjoyed RacketCon this year.
Re: Apology
#133I wonder how much of personality is genetic and largely out of the control of the person. I know mine is. I have two separate anxiety mutations - basically high functioning autism. I often find myself accidentally offending people. I preemptively cancelled myself as a precaution long ago.
It seems society has decided that some traits are innate and deserving of understanding and others are not.
Re: Apology
#134The only one who can judge the worthiness of this apology is Matthew Butterick himself. As for me, this sounds like the first steps of the self realization process Matthias should go through in an effort to better himself. Let's not judge it to harshly. Rather let's encourage him to keep on walking down that path of self improvement that we all should be on.
Apologies should be private. Public apologies are their own form of unhealthy societal bullying.
With respect, I disagree. I think public apologies, when a perceived insult occurred in public, are much stronger.
Re: Apology
#135Huh. It's interesting to see this come out now. Years ago I was planning on entering a PL PhD program until I met Felleisen. He yelled at me, insulted me, and I left nearly crying. That was the last straw that led to me leave academia, and I never came back. A young woman I know switched out of her computer science major after taking his class and said she still had nightmares about him. Another person I know worked…
I met Richard Stallman’s lawyer several years ago, having made an appointment with him to discuss our open source framework, Qbix.
Eben Moglen had a nice office near Lincoln Center in NYC. Somehow on the way to the office, he had taken a look at our site and mistook something on it... by the time I arrived, he spent the entire time yelling at me and berating whatever he could find out about me. A very strange character.
Having said that, he did help me find out what I was after: how to make sure large corporations wouldn’t use my open source code while smaller ones could — we should use Affero GPL.
So, all in all it was a productive meeting. But still, it was pretty surreal.
Apparently he has done it with other people too: https://observer.com/2011/12/in-which-eben-moglen-like-legit...
There is more to this. A couple years prior he had encouraged four NYU students to start Diaspora, a similar project to ours...
Re: Apology
#136Took a hard cs course with fellisen at NU. Dude is ignorant to his toxic behavior, preaching egoless programming while being needlessly cruel during graded presentations. I know many cs folks at NU refused to take his classes.
I worked for one of these types many labelled an asshole and grew to love it, and he had the most loyal group of people around him you could imagine. There's a super important distinction between the person with extremely high standards that skewers anything mediocre and that can legitimately be won over by doing exceptional work (my old boss), and the narcissist who is critical for the mere purposes of bullying (or…
Isn't that also the pedagogical philosophy of Terence Fletcher? Just kidding, of course.
Re: Apology
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for one of these types many labelled an asshole and grew to love it, and he had the most loyal group of people around him you could imagine. There's a super important distinction between the person with extremely high standards that skewers anything mediocre and that can legitimately be won over by doing exceptional work (my old boss), and the narcissist who is critical for the mere purposes of bullying (or…
Isn't that also the pedagogical philosophy of Terence Fletcher? Just kidding, of course.
That's true, so there is such a thing as taking it too far. But a lean/tilt in that direction is something I appreciate.
Re: Apology
#138Took a hard cs course with fellisen at NU. Dude is ignorant to his toxic behavior, preaching egoless programming while being needlessly cruel during graded presentations. I know many cs folks at NU refused to take his classes.
I worked for one of these types many labelled an asshole and grew to love it, and he had the most loyal group of people around him you could imagine. There's a super important distinction between the person with extremely high standards that skewers anything mediocre and that can legitimately be won over by doing exceptional work (my old boss), and the narcissist who is critical for the mere purposes of bullying (or…
You sir were a flying monkey.
Re: Apology
#139Huh. It's interesting to see this come out now. Years ago I was planning on entering a PL PhD program until I met Felleisen. He yelled at me, insulted me, and I left nearly crying. That was the last straw that led to me leave academia, and I never came back. A young woman I know switched out of her computer science major after taking his class and said she still had nightmares about him. Another person I know worked…
This is a really thoughtful comment, especially considering your personal experience.
There's a hard problem here: what should be done with people who interact poorly with others but are talented and driven? I don't know, but exiling them seems like a shame. Training them to play nice may not be possible.
A reasonable option may be recognizing that some talented people are "difficult" and providing students with a path around them. Keep the professor who makes students cry but don't require anyone to take his classes, ensure that there's a path to a degree that goes around him.
We should keep in mind that there may be no correlation between being a douchebag and being talented but there's also no correlation between being nice and being talented.
Re: Apology
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for one of these types many labelled an asshole and grew to love it, and he had the most loyal group of people around him you could imagine. There's a super important distinction between the person with extremely high standards that skewers anything mediocre and that can legitimately be won over by doing exceptional work (my old boss), and the narcissist who is critical for the mere purposes of bullying (or…
You sir were a flying monkey.
This comment is why I said it's important to draw the distinction between narcissists and non-narcissists with extremely high standards.
Narcissistic abuse coming from either sadism or narcissistic injury is a phenomenon specific to people with NPD or perhaps subclinical narcissism
My old boss, for example, had little indication of having NPD. If someone was disagreeable and did zero to feed his ego, yet their work was exceptional, that person would get praise. That is not the behavior of a narcissist.