161–170 of 282 posts
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Who said it absolves him? The question is why attack him for apologizing?
Because the apology is so shallow and glib and self-serving that it's literally worse than no apology.
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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 pa…
>Training them to play nice may not be possible. I'm autistic. It is possible for the socially inept to learn to be less of an asshole and to have better interactions with other people. I did it and we should expect everyone to make an effort to be kinder.
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I’m autistic too, and I think what happens is that autistic people who also happen to be brilliant are not expected to learn how to interact well with others to the same extent that autistic folk of average intelligence are, so it ends up being on them whether they care enough about being kind and gentle to others to learn how to interact congenially. I know a lot of autistic people and most of them are nice but some…
The other side of this is that some of us do end up trying to fit in, hiding it but not well enough... Just come off as assholes or socially inept and hurting peoples feelings a lot more than if you were obviously on the spectrum,
Huh. 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 charact…
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Because the apology is so shallow and glib and self-serving that it's literally worse than no apology.
It might be a bad and insufficient apology, but people always say that, about all apologies, even honest and good ones. A more workable policy would be to never criticize apologies, but accept them and move on. You never want to make apologizing a sure-losing move.
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I’m autistic too, and I think what happens is that autistic people who also happen to be brilliant are not expected to learn how to interact well with others to the same extent that autistic folk of average intelligence are, so it ends up being on them whether they care enough about being kind and gentle to others to learn how to interact congenially. I know a lot of autistic people and most of them are nice but some…
The other side of this is that some of us do end up trying to fit in, hiding it but not well enough... Just come off as assholes or socially inept and hurting peoples feelings a lot more than if you were obviously on the spectrum,
On the other hand, society should try to be more tolerant and understanding of people who find doing so significantly more challenging than the average person does.
I worry that this conversation seems to be focusing on the first point and not paying as much attention to the second.
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The other side of this is that some of us do end up trying to fit in, hiding it but not well enough... Just come off as assholes or socially inept and hurting peoples feelings a lot more than if you were obviously on the spectrum,
On the one hand, people should try to fit in with society. On the other hand, society should try to be more tolerant and understanding of people who find doing so significantly more challenging than the average person does. I worry that this conversation seems to be focusing on the first point and not paying as much attention to the second.
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I really think people need to learn to push back, and talk plainly. This could have easily been a blog called "that time Felleisen was being a cunt and I told him to go fuck himself" and been 1/4 the length.
There are very real cultural differences and taboos against questioning and pushing back against authority. What one culture may view as normal and expected process in improvement, another is horrified and ashamed to consider. Do not assume just because you've grown up or grown accustomed to it that it's 'normal' or practiced everywhere. This is perhaps one of the biggest frictions I see in teams that are full of fol…
Some of the differences in attitude towards work, co-workers and authority truly triggered rage in me. Then someone suggested that the reason for these differences are cultural, hence very deeply rooted and I can't expect to change them quickly or at all. For that reason, I should be the one who adapts, since now I understand the situation and I care to solve the problem.
I kinda agree with this assessment, but if I can put this effort in to even out cultural differences, so as the other party can, just have to make them aware of this discovery and try converge multiple times, since our goal is to work together.
There is a lot more to say, but that's how far I have the time to go now :)
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On the one hand, people should try to fit in with society. On the other hand, society should try to be more tolerant and understanding of people who find doing so significantly more challenging than the average person does. I worry that this conversation seems to be focusing on the first point and not paying as much attention to the second.
There's a difference between finding it challenging to fit in and being a bully though, and let's try not to collapse that.
Was Felleisen's behaviour a "deliberate misuse of power... that intends to cause physical, social and/or psychological harm"? I don't know this guy personally and all I've read is some stories about him on these blog posts, but I'm not sure if he was deliberately intending to hurt other people, or merely doing so inadvertently out of social incompetence, deficits in cognitive empathy, emotional dysregulation, theory of mind deficits, difficulties in perspective-taking, etc? Individuals with neurodevelopmental and other psychiatric disorders can sometimes exhibit all of those inadvertent sources of interpersonal harm. (I'm not saying Felleisen has any such disorder – maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, I have no idea, so I must assume he might.)
[0] https://www.ncab.org.au/bullying-advice/bullying-for-parents...
Huh. 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 pa…