4 ms·

It really seems like his real 'sin' is not being neurotypical. Should he try to have more tact? Sure, of course. But failing that, the correct response is co

It really seems like his real 'sin' is not being neurotypical. Should he try to have more tact? Sure, of course. But failing that, the correct response is compassion and gentle correction, not a witchhunt. Not driving him out of his jobs.

fwip 7y ago
I mean, this certainly isn't the first time that he's publicly said that he thinks "consenting pedophilia" is 100% fine, and it's not the first time that people have told him "Hey, don't say that, you're gonna get in trouble." At a certain point it stops looking like ignorance and stubbornness and more like he's got a horse in the race.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  You know he's also recanted that shit, right? > and more like he's got a horse in the race. Has the mob now progressed to insinuating that he's a pedophile himself? Is that what the 'horse in the race' idiom means in this context?
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Sure. He recanted those comments two days ago (after espousing them on his website at least between 2006 and 2013), and after his comments on the Epstein case started getting attention, which makes it look more like damage control than a genuine change in opinion. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_%28Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong%29 https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      I'd say recent statements more accurately reflect somebody's current beliefs than old statements. Considering how badly he's been recently slandered by media outlets leaving out context and mischaracterizing his remarks, I am disturbed by your willingness to exclude that context from your previous comment.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        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."
        partialrecall 7y ago
        So you believe Stallman's statements indicate he's a pedophile, not merely somebody with a long and established history of being tactless? Because I'd say there is a hell of a lot more evidence that he's tactless due to being neuroatypical. Maybe that makes him a bad leader, but it surely doesn't make him evil.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        > So you believe Stallman's statements indicate he's a pedophile... I think you're mixing me up with another commenter.
        partialrecall 7y ago
        You're right, I apologize.
        samantohermes 7y ago
        His statements aren't merely socially unappropriated, they are grossly logically incorrect.
        geaardheid 7y ago
        First, actually one couldn't know are them correct or not, considering heavy emotional involvement of the opponents. Second, the concept of the childhood is quite misdefined. Third, it is very hard to check correctness of such psychological statement, considering the large amount of influencing factors. Fourth, what do you mean by 'grossly wrong'? Is '2x2=5' grossly wrong, or just a bit wrong? Or what about Borsuk's conjecture? Is it grossly wrong, or may be it is wrong in some different manner ? As Richard Feynman said, nature can't be fooled; but when one trying to play a role of nature's Spanish inquisition, presuming that he or she couldn't be wrong him- or herself, it afaik worsens the thing a lot.
    - pvaldes 7y ago
      I assume that if he was a pedophile we all would knew it yet. If there was anything remotely naughty in the computer stolen from him in Argentina the thief would have reassured that even Santa Claus will hear about that, for a reasonable sum of money. Absence of of evidence is not evidence of absence, but philosophizing about murder does not make you a murderer
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Your unfounded accusation isn't acceptable. You ought to remove it.
  - fwip 7y ago
    It's not an accusation. It's just a comment on the optics of continuing to spout the same bad take for decades. It looks bad.
roywiggins 7y ago
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 overblown, but still. You don't have to look outside the four corners of what he wrote to see why it wasn't an excusable thing to blast out to a departmental email. Once you expand from those four corners to his prior comments on pedophilia it gets way worse. At a certain point, if you have lived as long as RMS has, you should have some knowledge of your own limitations. It would take an absolute master of rhetoric to make his argument and not have it taken badly. He is not one, and he should (at this point) have the barest humility to not subject the entire CSAIL mailing list to his half-baked ideas on how Minsky might be exonerated.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  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.
  - roywiggins 7y ago
    If it comes down to whether RMS's position at CSAIL amounted to a leadership position or not, I'd venture that it did. Professors have institutional power that everyone else on the CSAIL list who isn't one don't have. Someone who abuses their name and position to blast screeds like that, I can see why CSAIL might not want him around anymore.
    - throwaway1918 7y ago
      He was not a professor. He quit his job at MIT (as some sort of staff researcher/programmer) in 1984 to start the GNU project. He was an unpaid visiting scientist and had an office, although he was rarely in it (he spends a lot of time traveling). He did not have any institutional power beyond his participation as a rando on the mailing lists.
geofft 7y ago
Matthew Garrett, who served on the FSF board of directors, wrote about the "not being neurotypical" hypothesis two days ago: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html In particular, he says he did try to do the compassion and gentle correction work, and Stallman had no interest in it. Stallman's job has a job description - leading the Free Software Foundation. If he's not leading it effectively, it is important for his own cause that he step away, and it is important that the FSF Board do their job by finding someone more effective at it. If he's not suited for it for reasons outside of his control and never will be, that's all the more reason that we should compassionately and gently get him to find another job. (Also, I think this argument is deeply unfair to the many neuroatypical people in this world who still manage to not say the things Stallman does - which is in most cases not merely a matter of "tact," but even so, many of whom put conscious, learned effort into having tact. I have friends with all sorts of things going on in their brain who are wonderful people and in many cases also wonderful free software authors, and I think this argument does them a disservice.)
- partialrecall 7y ago
  I think it should go without saying that atypicality is not a binary matter.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Sure. I know people "on the spectrum," I know people with various forms of PTSD, I know people with bipolar, I know people with ADHD, I know plural folks, etc., and none of them act like RMS. I know very friendly, conscientious, and kind neuroatypical folks. I know brusque and tactless neuroatypical folks with whom it's draining to interact in certain ways. They still don't act like RMS. So the (implicit) argument "This is just what you expect with neuroatypical people" / "If we want to be welcoming of neuroatypical people, we have to be welcoming of people who act like RMS" is even less true because of how diverse the category is. We know RMS isn't being excluded because of his (hypothetical) neuroatypicality because there are so many neuroatypical people who aren't and wouldn't be excluded. If you want to argue that the problem with RMS is he is in the narrow category of people who act like RMS (and I would say that not even Linus Torvalds is in this category), that's a fine argument to make, but it's a bit circular to defend his inclusion on such grounds. Is this category the sort of category, like race or class or neurological makeup, that is beyond (or mostly beyond) one's control and has little correlation with whether you can do good work? Or is this a category like "asshole"?
wavefunction 7y ago
I downvoted you because both the neurotypical and neuro-atypical suffer from myopia, sentimentalism, favoritism, deficits of empathy, and methods for introducing and justifying moral lapses.
- selfawareposter 7y ago
  I’m also just sick of hearing about how old nerds just don’t know any better even when people are literally telling them to stop. That the topic is a bad idea. That they will make themselves look bad. And it’s deeply unfair to people who have issues to simply blame gross behavior in being “neuro-atypical”.
selfawareposter 7y ago
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.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  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.
  - mixologic 7y ago
    Tact and decorum are how ideas are presented. No amount of tact or decorum would make it possible to defend somebody for sleeping with an underage girl. He's attempting to find some remotely plausible scenario where the actions of his friend are morally acceptable. No amount of tact makes that okay, and complete lack of tact just makes it worse.
  - azernik 7y ago
    GP's point was that social obliviousness is no excuse.

fwip 7y ago

I mean, this certainly isn't the first time that he's publicly said that he thinks "consenting pedophilia" is 100% fine, and it's not the first time that people have told him "Hey, don't say that, you're gonna get in trouble." At a certain point it stops looking like ignorance and stubbornness and more like he's got a horse in the race.

partialrecall 7y ago
You know he's also recanted that shit, right? > and more like he's got a horse in the race. Has the mob now progressed to insinuating that he's a pedophile himself? Is that what the 'horse in the race' idiom means in this context?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Sure. He recanted those comments two days ago (after espousing them on his website at least between 2006 and 2013), and after his comments on the Epstein case started getting attention, which makes it look more like damage control than a genuine change in opinion. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_%28Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong%29 https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    I'd say recent statements more accurately reflect somebody's current beliefs than old statements. Considering how badly he's been recently slandered by media outlets leaving out context and mischaracterizing his remarks, I am disturbed by your willingness to exclude that context from your previous comment.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      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."
      - partialrecall 7y ago
        So you believe Stallman's statements indicate he's a pedophile, not merely somebody with a long and established history of being tactless? Because I'd say there is a hell of a lot more evidence that he's tactless due to being neuroatypical. Maybe that makes him a bad leader, but it surely doesn't make him evil.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        > So you believe Stallman's statements indicate he's a pedophile... I think you're mixing me up with another commenter.
        partialrecall 7y ago
        You're right, I apologize.
        samantohermes 7y ago
        His statements aren't merely socially unappropriated, they are grossly logically incorrect.
        geaardheid 7y ago
        First, actually one couldn't know are them correct or not, considering heavy emotional involvement of the opponents. Second, the concept of the childhood is quite misdefined. Third, it is very hard to check correctness of such psychological statement, considering the large amount of influencing factors. Fourth, what do you mean by 'grossly wrong'? Is '2x2=5' grossly wrong, or just a bit wrong? Or what about Borsuk's conjecture? Is it grossly wrong, or may be it is wrong in some different manner ? As Richard Feynman said, nature can't be fooled; but when one trying to play a role of nature's Spanish inquisition, presuming that he or she couldn't be wrong him- or herself, it afaik worsens the thing a lot.
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    I assume that if he was a pedophile we all would knew it yet. If there was anything remotely naughty in the computer stolen from him in Argentina the thief would have reassured that even Santa Claus will hear about that, for a reasonable sum of money. Absence of of evidence is not evidence of absence, but philosophizing about murder does not make you a murderer
michaelmrose 7y ago
Your unfounded accusation isn't acceptable. You ought to remove it.
- fwip 7y ago
  It's not an accusation. It's just a comment on the optics of continuing to spout the same bad take for decades. It looks bad.

roywiggins 7y ago

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 overblown, but still. You don't have to look outside the four corners of what he wrote to see why it wasn't an excusable thing to blast out to a departmental email. Once you expand from those four corners to his prior comments on pedophilia it gets way worse. At a certain point, if you have lived as long as RMS has, you should have some knowledge of your own limitations. It would take an absolute master of rhetoric to make his argument and not have it taken badly. He is not one, and he should (at this point) have the barest humility to not subject the entire CSAIL mailing list to his half-baked ideas on how Minsky might be exonerated.

partialrecall 7y ago
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.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  If it comes down to whether RMS's position at CSAIL amounted to a leadership position or not, I'd venture that it did. Professors have institutional power that everyone else on the CSAIL list who isn't one don't have. Someone who abuses their name and position to blast screeds like that, I can see why CSAIL might not want him around anymore.
  - throwaway1918 7y ago
    He was not a professor. He quit his job at MIT (as some sort of staff researcher/programmer) in 1984 to start the GNU project. He was an unpaid visiting scientist and had an office, although he was rarely in it (he spends a lot of time traveling). He did not have any institutional power beyond his participation as a rando on the mailing lists.

geofft 7y ago

Matthew Garrett, who served on the FSF board of directors, wrote about the "not being neurotypical" hypothesis two days ago: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html In particular, he says he did try to do the compassion and gentle correction work, and Stallman had no interest in it. Stallman's job has a job description - leading the Free Software Foundation. If he's not leading it effectively, it is important for his own cause that he step away, and it is important that the FSF Board do their job by finding someone more effective at it. If he's not suited for it for reasons outside of his control and never will be, that's all the more reason that we should compassionately and gently get him to find another job. (Also, I think this argument is deeply unfair to the many neuroatypical people in this world who still manage to not say the things Stallman does - which is in most cases not merely a matter of "tact," but even so, many of whom put conscious, learned effort into having tact. I have friends with all sorts of things going on in their brain who are wonderful people and in many cases also wonderful free software authors, and I think this argument does them a disservice.)

partialrecall 7y ago
I think it should go without saying that atypicality is not a binary matter.
- geofft 7y ago
  Sure. I know people "on the spectrum," I know people with various forms of PTSD, I know people with bipolar, I know people with ADHD, I know plural folks, etc., and none of them act like RMS. I know very friendly, conscientious, and kind neuroatypical folks. I know brusque and tactless neuroatypical folks with whom it's draining to interact in certain ways. They still don't act like RMS. So the (implicit) argument "This is just what you expect with neuroatypical people" / "If we want to be welcoming of neuroatypical people, we have to be welcoming of people who act like RMS" is even less true because of how diverse the category is. We know RMS isn't being excluded because of his (hypothetical) neuroatypicality because there are so many neuroatypical people who aren't and wouldn't be excluded. If you want to argue that the problem with RMS is he is in the narrow category of people who act like RMS (and I would say that not even Linus Torvalds is in this category), that's a fine argument to make, but it's a bit circular to defend his inclusion on such grounds. Is this category the sort of category, like race or class or neurological makeup, that is beyond (or mostly beyond) one's control and has little correlation with whether you can do good work? Or is this a category like "asshole"?

wavefunction 7y ago

I downvoted you because both the neurotypical and neuro-atypical suffer from myopia, sentimentalism, favoritism, deficits of empathy, and methods for introducing and justifying moral lapses.

selfawareposter 7y ago
I’m also just sick of hearing about how old nerds just don’t know any better even when people are literally telling them to stop. That the topic is a bad idea. That they will make themselves look bad. And it’s deeply unfair to people who have issues to simply blame gross behavior in being “neuro-atypical”.

selfawareposter 7y ago

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.

partialrecall 7y ago
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.
- mixologic 7y ago
  Tact and decorum are how ideas are presented. No amount of tact or decorum would make it possible to defend somebody for sleeping with an underage girl. He's attempting to find some remotely plausible scenario where the actions of his friend are morally acceptable. No amount of tact makes that okay, and complete lack of tact just makes it worse.
- azernik 7y ago
  GP's point was that social obliviousness is no excuse.