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I think this can be best described as "sinking the boat just to kill the captain." In the interest of being the devil's advocate: if he is telling the truth, t

I think this can be best described as "sinking the boat just to kill the captain." In the interest of being the devil's advocate: if he is telling the truth, this looks very bad for several of the women that accused him of sexual harassment, and tried to inflate his cheating on his wife into something much worse. I mean, this sounds a lot like how some women accuse guys of rape just to cause harm to them, instead of a rape actually having occurred. Such actions are harmful to women, harmful to society as a whole, and actively work against the ideals of feminism and make it harder for feminists to have a meaningful dialog with both men and women alike. If his version of events is even remotely true, merely saying "two wrongs don't make a right" isn't even scratching the surface, and indicates a very large problem in the tech industry community. I have no clue if they are true, or how true they are, but I believe that because he disregarded his lawyer's advice and made a statement, there is at least a little bit of truth here.

CJefferson 9y ago
Lots of people commit crimes and deny them. To me, the idea that an apparently disconnected set of women would all come forward with similar stories set off serious alarm bells. Why would a series of women all accuse the same man? Of course, we can still wait for this to make it's way through court, but I feel your defensiveness is too strong in the other direction, going straight to accusing all the women of being liars.
minimaxir 9y ago
> I have no clue if they are true, or how true they are, but I believe that because he disregarded his lawyer's advice and made a statement, there is at least a little bit of truth here. Quinn Norton’s account of her interactions with Scoble has been corroborated by multiple witnesses and it drastically disagrees with Scoble’s account: https://twitter.com/willoremus/status/923257035742781440 https://twitter.com/willoremus/status/923257035742781440 Layers advise clients to remain silent even if they are 100% innocent because talking almost always makes things worse.
- arkades 9y ago
  That is a link to a screen grab of a Norton quote alongside a screen grab of a Scoble quote. It doesn’t seem to include any corroboration by anyone. Wrong link?
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    That screengrab was to highlight the differences; for corroboration, see the comments section in Norton’s article itself: https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee92fffb https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee9...
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    It was corroborated by Tim O’Reilly, who went further and said that Scoble’s behavior got him banned from future O’Reilly conferences: https://mobile.twitter.com/timoreilly/status/921124414418182144 https://mobile.twitter.com/timoreilly/status/921124414418182...
ajross 9y ago
> I mean, this sounds a lot like how some women accuse guys of rape just to cause harm to them, instead of a rape actually having occurred. It was deliberately crafted to be so. So if we want to apply some science to our guessing: what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society? You can "some women" and "because he disgregarded" your way around the disembling, but the truth is that if you really want to guess based on the evidence at hand, the guy is probably guilty.
- codefined 9y ago
  Hell, studies have said anywhere between 2% to 90%[0] of rape reports are false, but telling that a rape is false / true is _incredibly_ hard due to it basically being "he says" vs. "she says". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumney_.282006.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumne...
  - DanBC 9y ago
    For clarity: the larger more rigorous studies put it much closer to the 2% end.
    - asdfasfhretwt 9y ago
      -
  - mnem 9y ago
    The 90% figure from that list is described by the study which listed it as from an unreliable/untested research methodology with a small sample size (18 cases). It looks more like ~20% is a more common upper bound for the figures listed.
- vkou 9y ago
  > what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society? If I were to believe the personal experiences of all the women I know, most women have, at some point in their lives been harassed. I've had 20 #mee_toos on my relatively small Facebook feed. Not a single one of them ever mentioned reporting the harassment they experienced to authorities, filing a lawsuit, writing a blog post on Medium, calling out the harasser on social media, or anything of that nature. For another anecdote: Two months ago, though, one friend has been tip-toeing around how to deal with a serial rapist in their friend circle. They didn't go to the police, because nothing would get done, and they didn't call that person out in public. They weren't looking for attention, or to ruin the rapist's life. They were practically tip-toeing around the issue of how to warn other women about him. Unsurprisingly, of the many responses to that thread, three people knew exactly who she was talking about.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

CJefferson 9y ago

Lots of people commit crimes and deny them. To me, the idea that an apparently disconnected set of women would all come forward with similar stories set off serious alarm bells. Why would a series of women all accuse the same man? Of course, we can still wait for this to make it's way through court, but I feel your defensiveness is too strong in the other direction, going straight to accusing all the women of being liars.

minimaxir 9y ago

> I have no clue if they are true, or how true they are, but I believe that because he disregarded his lawyer's advice and made a statement, there is at least a little bit of truth here. Quinn Norton’s account of her interactions with Scoble has been corroborated by multiple witnesses and it drastically disagrees with Scoble’s account: https://twitter.com/willoremus/status/923257035742781440 https://twitter.com/willoremus/status/923257035742781440 Layers advise clients to remain silent even if they are 100% innocent because talking almost always makes things worse.

arkades 9y ago
That is a link to a screen grab of a Norton quote alongside a screen grab of a Scoble quote. It doesn’t seem to include any corroboration by anyone. Wrong link?
- minimaxir 9y ago
  That screengrab was to highlight the differences; for corroboration, see the comments section in Norton’s article itself: https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee92fffb https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee9...
- smacktoward 9y ago
  It was corroborated by Tim O’Reilly, who went further and said that Scoble’s behavior got him banned from future O’Reilly conferences: https://mobile.twitter.com/timoreilly/status/921124414418182144 https://mobile.twitter.com/timoreilly/status/921124414418182...

ajross 9y ago

> I mean, this sounds a lot like how some women accuse guys of rape just to cause harm to them, instead of a rape actually having occurred. It was deliberately crafted to be so. So if we want to apply some science to our guessing: what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society? You can "some women" and "because he disgregarded" your way around the disembling, but the truth is that if you really want to guess based on the evidence at hand, the guy is probably guilty.

codefined 9y ago
Hell, studies have said anywhere between 2% to 90%[0] of rape reports are false, but telling that a rape is false / true is _incredibly_ hard due to it basically being "he says" vs. "she says". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumney_.282006.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Rumne...
- DanBC 9y ago
  For clarity: the larger more rigorous studies put it much closer to the 2% end.
  - asdfasfhretwt 9y ago
    -
- mnem 9y ago
  The 90% figure from that list is described by the study which listed it as from an unreliable/untested research methodology with a small sample size (18 cases). It looks more like ~20% is a more common upper bound for the figures listed.
vkou 9y ago
> what is the fraction of real harrassment incidents to fraudulently reported ones in our society? If I were to believe the personal experiences of all the women I know, most women have, at some point in their lives been harassed. I've had 20 #mee_toos on my relatively small Facebook feed. Not a single one of them ever mentioned reporting the harassment they experienced to authorities, filing a lawsuit, writing a blog post on Medium, calling out the harasser on social media, or anything of that nature. For another anecdote: Two months ago, though, one friend has been tip-toeing around how to deal with a serial rapist in their friend circle. They didn't go to the police, because nothing would get done, and they didn't call that person out in public. They weren't looking for attention, or to ruin the rapist's life. They were practically tip-toeing around the issue of how to warn other women about him. Unsurprisingly, of the many responses to that thread, three people knew exactly who she was talking about.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]