251–260 of 357 posts
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Well, then, I guess Gerry Sussmann will have to go next!
https://web.archive.org/web/20101112051649/http://www.jeffre... "Jeffrey Epstein is one of the most amazing, interesting, and brilliant people that I know.” – Gerald Sussman, Panasonic Professor of Engineering, MIT
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As a general rule, I tend to give more credit to consistent and freely offered opinions espoused over years than a sudden conversion immediately after a PR crisis. There's a famous saying: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
How do you reconcile (a) your implication that Stallman is flip-flopping due to public pressure with (b) Stallman's lifetime as a Diogenean polemic who has been shown to stand by his beliefs, no matter how unpopular?
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I expect CSAIL is bristling with non-neurotypical people who didn't take this as a good time to come to the defense of Marvin Minksy in such a frankly bizarre way. It's one thing to say I don't think he did it , but to say "if he did it, it would not have been bad, and in this essay I will-" and to then distribute that to the entire CSAIL mailing list! I'll grant that some of the headlines about what RMS wrote were o…
I think Stallman is tactless, and I've thought that for years. That email didn't change anything I thought about him. I also think that being tactless is not a moral crime. It's aesthetically offensive and counterproductive from a leadership perspective, but being a bad leader doesn't make somebody a bad person.
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No. His sin was what he said. His sin was having a history of pretty disturbing comments about child porn and sex with children and animals. Sorry but you don’t get to weasel out by saying you have poor social skills.
If you'd ever met the man, you would know that Stallman being social oblivious with no tact or decorum is not merely some idle claim.
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Would that somehow absolve Minsky? A "willing" obviously young girl seems to want to have sex with somebody she doesnt know. If Minsky suddenly find himself in the plot to a porno, and just went along with it, then trying to defend his moral culpability is probably a lot out of the bounds of acceptability.
I didn't say it would absolve Minsky. Somebody who has sex with a prostitute is lower than dirt in my book.
I think we should be more worried about the control that media (and especially clickbait-worthy online media) can exert over our lives. It's clear to anyone who has done their research, that his quotes were taken out of context or mis-characterised to create a specific narrative meant to fuel anger and drive visitors to the 'news' websites. It's a real shame that we can no longer discuss certain topics without fear o…
Is anyone else baffled by the idea that discussing something on an intellectual level, even related to a person, has to somehow be a 'defense' or an 'offense'? I've spent basically my entire life discussing things in the abstract. I'm not a politician, I don't make laws, and frankly I wouldn't want that power. To me it makes absolute sense that someone would attempt to "defend" even the most heinous person. It's weir…
The conditions that apply to an "Ethics tutorial in a philosophy paper" aren't universally applicable, and that isn't a sign of something being wrong. It took me a while to understand this myself. Suppose you wished to discuss "ethical problems" in a tutorial, people can do that, and in some other (limited) environments too. You might - to invoke a particularly awful idea - like to hypothetically explore whether what…
>A person in a leadership or representational role doesn't get to publicly speculate about "clothing and sexual assault" in the abstract [...]
How is this applicable to Stallman? What was Stallman doing at MIT? It doesn't seem like he's in any sort of leadership position.
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There's a big difference. "Presented as" does not mean "was", and the sentence immediately after that makes it clear that he didn't mean it as such. There are other pretty bad comments, yes. If most of the coverage focused on those rather than something he didn't actually say, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it.
Here here, RMS is a weirdo but he's being vilified for things that do not effect his job in any way, he is by no means a representative for MIT, and his opinions on unrelated matters (no matter how misguided they might be) do not change his ability to represent the FSF.
For what it's worth, RMS' statements on the matter don't appear to concern what is "right", "wrong", or "acceptable" - they appear to concern only the available evidence. Then again, I've only seen the two quotes appearing in the HN threads.
EDIT:
The specific relevant passage is on page 7. Copied verbatim - line with a '>' is Stallman quoting another e-mail in the thread.
"""
> Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it __rape__ in the Virgin Islands.
Does it really? I think it is morally absurd to define "rape" in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.
I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term "sexual assault" is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone.
"""
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OK. At least, as your link shows, they eventually admitted they were wrong once the Cold War ended and the records became available. In my experience outlets like the NYT do issue corrections - e.g. just over this weekend, they published a pretty questionable story about Judge Kavanaugh but then published a correction within a day when the article was challenged and compared to the book it was based on. In comparison…
Many contemporaries of Walter Duranty knew he was full of shit, but for the NYTs his lies were politically convenient. That time it took them half a century to come clean. In your example with Kavanaugh, it took them no more than a year or so. So if anything, they're getting better. Certainly some organizations have better reputations than others, and I do trust the NYTs more than I trust Vice. My point in all of thi…
I mainly wanted to call attention to how online outlets are so focused on headlines and clicks they have even less incentive than the past to be truthful or curate a reputation for accuracy.
When your views depend not on a base of weekly subscribers or businesses advertising in the classifieds, but on how viral your story is and how many ad impressions it can get, the truth suffers even more than it used to.
Can information be suppressed as easily now? No, as you point out the primary sources of information are far more widely disseminated than they ever have been in the past (e.g. all the videos from both sides coming out of the Syrian civil war thanks to cell phones and YouTube). But if people are still trusting in secondary sources and don’t check the primary source when it’s available, that doesn’t help as much as it could.