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He’s autistic. Suddenly the people who were annoyingly vocal about being “inclusive” are forgetting Stallman’s disability. He says “creepy” things because he do
by qzx_pierri 7y ago
He’s autistic. Suddenly the people who were annoyingly vocal about being “inclusive” are forgetting Stallman’s disability. He says “creepy” things because he doesn’t understand social cues or casual communication at a certain level. Everyone in this thread demonizing RMS should be ashamed of themselves. This is the same reason why he can’t hold a relationship, or why he sleeps in his office. He’s just far out there - This doesn’t take anything away from his hard work, his genius, or his dedication. He never had a chance. People look at the “evidence”, but refuse to look at it with the proper context.
- mlevental 7y ago>He’s autistic. this is literally the "we need better mental health facilities because of gun violence" argument. the vast majority of autistic people do not behave like stallman. it's not a pass. if he's so fucking smart why didn't he figure out how to comport himself better amongst the normies?
- megous 7y agoYou can start by reading something about the condition, instead of assuming and insinuating, and making inacurate similies.
- raxxorrax 7y agoPlainly spoken, he probably underestimated the mental abilities of his listeners and wasn't prepared for his statements to be misinterpreted in this way.
- throwawayjava 7y ago> He’s autistic... He never had a chance. That's quite bleak.
- sp332 7y agoThis is bull. He had decades to learn not to make women uncomfortable by doing one single thing - calling his business card his "pleasure" card when he handed it to a woman - and he still does that. That's not autism. Autism might hypothetically lead to doing that until someone pulled him aside and told him it was creepy and made others uncomfortable. After that it's just being an asshole.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thanatropism 7y agoI'm copy-pasting a comment from earlier on because I got late to that discussion and it's doubly relevant when the standard here has gone down from "hindered the work of MIT/FSF" to "made XX-class people uncomfortable". -- I think the most interesting part of this gotterdamerung is the claim in “Remove Stallman appendix A” that if the work of a Great Genius hinders The work of some number of talented skilled folk, then society is ultimately at a loss. I’m not certain that this is necessarily true. Or false for that matter. I have an intuition, possibly colored by an overall culture of hero worship, that it is false. This is the rationale: the dynamics large groups of people inevitably approaches that of a committee. Committees are averaging devices that smooth potentially groundbreaking ideas out of serious consideration. Genius on the other hand is not only extraordinarily capable of such groundbreaking ideas but is able to insist on them doggedly. OTOH it means that one true genius (and maybe Stallman isn’t one, but true geniuses have very very often been assholes) is worth almost an infinite number of merely talented folk. The ultimate question: what lifted us from mere animal status 10-15K years ago? A handful of geniuses or a general society awakening? But also; how may “young talented physicists” it takes to change a lightbulb?
- danbolt 7y agoProbably a general society awakening, my gut says to be honest with you. I think quality of life, progress, and stable economies/societies are ones that efficiently organize themselves into groups or orders.
- glangdale 7y agoThe problem with your argument is that it implies that the people who were chased away from CSAIL, MIT or CS in general by people like Stallman were all planning to pile into a giant ineffective committee with each other and thus can be assumed to be No Great Loss, which is... a rather peculiar leap of logic. There's no reason to suppose this. Even accepting your logic, the people he discouraged from CS might have wound up being highly effective solo contributors or worked in small teams.
- vvanders 7y agoWhat about all the women he made feel unsafe, should we not be inclusive of them too? If someone cannot handle social situations without making people feel unsafe they should not be in a leadership position.
- chroma 7y agoSo by that logic, if there was a group of mostly autistic/aspie men and they felt unsafe around one neurotypical woman, she should be the one to lose her position at a university, lose her position at a nonprofit that she founded, and be kicked out on the street, right? "Feeling unsafe" is an absurd metric to use. Lots of things feel unsafe but are actually extremely safe. Many people feel unsafe flying on airplanes. Though they may not admit it publicly, lots of people feel unsafe around black men. Also, since one can't introspect another person's feelings, the metric of "feeling unsafe" is ripe for abuse. If you don't like someone, simply claim you feel unsafe around them. You can't reliably tell the difference between a liar and a fragile soul. There is only one thing that generalizes: objective rules and encouraging people to be more understanding. And part of becoming more understanding involves growing a thicker skin. That's the only way that you can have a functioning community that includes communists, libertarians, young earth creationists, Muslims, Mormons, Quakers, atheists, pro-lifers, pro-choicers, Trump supporters, and Bernie supporters. We may not be able to converge on beliefs, but we can get along and work towards common causes. That is, provided that people in the group aren't catastrophizing and looking for any possible reason to be upset at one another.
- journalctl 7y agoWell, if she had a decades-long pattern of abusive and tasteless behavior towards people with less power than her, such that people went out of their way to avoid interacting with her at all, then yeah, I’d say hit the bricks. You’re tilting at strawmen to get around the fact that Stallman can’t seem to control his inappropriate behavior. This isn’t a hypothetical, perfectly spherical, frictionless situation, this is documented patterns of behavior. Not that it should be necessary for understanding, but would you want to explain to your wife/daughter/sister/mother/aunt/any other woman in your life how a sign reading “Knight of Hot Ladies” is at all an appropriate thing to display in an office at MIT? Imagine being gay and Stallman had a sign that read “Knight of Bashing Homos”. Try to imagine how that would make you feel if you were gay. People feel unsafe because he says the same things abusers say, and act the same way they act. Abusers don’t treat women like people or colleagues or equals, they treat them like objects. And, if I take the gold medal in mental gymnastics I can imagine years of Stallman not realizing that all of the stuff he says and does is harmful, but that doesn’t make it any less inappropriate.
- kelnos 7y agoIf you have a condition where you have trouble interacting socially with people, while also running an influential organization and acting as its figurehead, you need to be able to mitigate these issues. If this means you have an assistant who you run emails by before sending them, so be it. If your assistant also takes a look at your office (given to you as a favor by a respected educational institution) and tells you that "Knight of Hot Ladies" is not appropriate, then you take it down. If female colleagues are putting plants in their offices because they know you don't like plants and it will deter you from visiting them, you either need to recognize that on your own and do something about it, or allow a trusted someone to help you fix the situation. Autism isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It can explain some bad behavior, but that bad behavior cannot continue over decades; it must be dealt with in some manner. I cannot believe people keep defending him given the accounts of what he's actually done (assuming you believe the accounts). What about the women who have been creeped out or harassed by him, or who have left the field because of him? Don't they get any consideration? As Matthew Garrett has pointed out (through personal experience with RMS), "the problem isn't that he's unable to understand, the problem is that he's unwilling to"[0]. So I don't buy the "because autism" line here. [0] https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1172422966904160257 https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1172422966904160257
- vnth93 7y agoIf he had the capacity to comprehend any of this he wouldn't be the sort of person who talked about the Knight of Hot Ladies at work. Unless Garrett somehow turned out to be a some kind of medical expert, his opinion on Stallman is about valid as Stallman's on anyone else.
- pfooti 7y agoThere's a lot of neuroatypical people who don't defend pedophilia or harass people. Don't make it an excuse, it ends up making you sound like you're saying all autistic people are harassing assholes who can't help being assholes. Which is patently untrue.
- toofy 7y agoI don’t mean to sound snarky, but this really discounts so many factors in how autism is dealt with and even worse it makes it sound as if autistic people are unable to learn how their actions impact people around them, which is of course completely untrue. Autistic people may have difficulty interpreting things such as social cues, but they are absolutely not incapable. We have indications from many of those closest to RMS that he was willfully dismissive of others feelings. It wasn’t that he was unaware, he was both aware of his difficulties reading others, and made a choice to be dismissive. It’s painful, I get it. I met RMS many times and still consider him to be one of our era’s great minds and one who’s actions have had nothing short of an incredible impact on society. However, he has–despite this article from his publicist–a long history of bad actions. I believe there should always be a path forward if people wish to remain a public figure. But this path can’t start with easily disprovable excuses.
- vnth93 7y agoSorry but I'm going to have to ask for the basis of your claim here. It is wellknown that autistic people's lack of selfawareness is varying and inconsistent and how much they can overcome this depends heavily on how much help they received. Normal people misread the intentions of each other on a regular basis yet are somehow experts on the autistic mind?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThe ability to overcome the effect of a disability is partly how severe it is, partly how much and what kind of support one gets and partly time and effort. It's a constant effort and during times of stress it's hard or impossible to maintain. An awful lot of so-called "normal" men manage to offend women right and left. There are raft loads of women very up in arms about "normal" male behavior. The world generally has a very long way to go to resolve that question.
- yumyai 7y agoSorry, but I couldn't bring myself to read your whole reply. It is like you are saying that people without legs are not unable to walk, they are unwilling.
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- tjpnz 7y agoI've come to a very similar conclusion. Outrage culture does have a way of disproportionately targeting those on the spectrum as well as people who might suffer from ADHD/ADD. People who fall into those categories will often be a bit more impulsive when saying whatever's on their mind and will by definition have quite different ways of thinking about things. Simply telling one of these people to stop saying stupid things isn't going to work and makes the person come across as being just as ignorant.
- BeetleB 7y ago>He’s autistic. I keep hearing this - has he ever been diagnosed? Why do people keep saying this?
- vkou 7y agoTo drum up sympathy for his behavior, by blaming it on a medical issue.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIIRC, in a biography about him, his mother suggested that autism would certainly make sense given some of his childhood behavior. As far as I know, he doesn't have a formal diagnosis, but I'm hardly some expert on RMS.
- meruru 7y agoFound a few passages in Free as in Freedom (https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/faif-2.0.pdf): >A December, 2001, Wired magazine article titled “The Geek Syndrome” paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome. In many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the Wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by Lippman. Stallman also speculates about this. In the interview for a 2000 profile for the TorontoStar, Stallman said he wondered if he were “borderline autistic.” >In recent years, Lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. “I do feel that Richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child,” she says. “I regret that so little was known about autism back then. ”Over time, however, Lippman says her son learned to adjust. By age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city. >Watch the Stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. What appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and main-tain contact. If his personality has a touch or “shadow” of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, a possibility that Stallman has entertained from time to time, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. Even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost. My own first encounter
- solidasparagus 7y agoHe is? Working in CSAIL for years, I would never have guessed that he was autistic. The email threads are lost to me now, but I remember him being unyielding and obnoxiously dedicated to free software, but he never seemed unaware of social cues. He always struck me as a very good communicator - someone who understood exactly how obnoxious he was, he was just a true believer so he didn't really care.
- chasing 7y agoIs he actually autistic? Or is it a convenient diagnosis people give him to excuse his behavior? (I can't find any actual reference to him being autistic on the web. Please enlighten me.)
- ineedasername 7y agoYou make it sound as though autistic people are unable to learn appropriate social behavior. That is not only false, it does an extreme disservice to the entire community of people on the spectrum.
- ahelwer 7y agoWell it's a spectrum, right? Some can, some can't - or refuse, for reasons related to them being on the spectrum.
- ineedasername 7y agoI'm not sure that interpretation accurately represents the abilities of someone on the spectrum that is able to do productive work in society. But regardless, not everyone with all disabilities are qualified for all jobs. In this case, whatever the cause of Stallman's unwillingness &/or inability to behave in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable or bullied, it also makes him unsuitable for these leadership roles. While some of GNU & FSF can be laid at his feet, in many ways they became successful despite him, not because of him.
- dependenttypes 7y agoAs a non-neurotypical person, I will have to honestly say that teaching autistic people ""appropriate"" social behavior is comparable to abuse, steaming from the unwillingness of neurotypical to accept something that is not them and consider logic above their feelings for once.
- watwut 7y agoAutistic people do not actually interact in logical way. They are unaware of own emotions and unaware of other peoples emotions. Their behavior or opinions are not more logical nor more correct. Angry yelling autistic is as illogical as angry neurotypical. Just because autistic is totally convinced he or she is super right, does not make it so. Just because neurotypical do not share autistic preference does not make him illogical, does not make his code "objectively" shitty or crappy. It does not make non-autistic illogical to not keep same routine nor to unintentionally disrupt autistic routine. No matter how much autistic calls neurotypical doing something different as yesterday stupid or irrational. I agree that neurotypical should accept autistic needs and personalities, but not to the point that they allow themselves to be bullied. And vice versa. Autistic people do have feelings and react to them. Quite strongly. Autistic do get insulted too.
- newnewpdro 7y agoAutism has become the junk drawer of disorders everyone seems to think they're somehow qualified to diagnose. Could you provide some actual evidence of RMS being formally diagnosed as autistic? Because otherwise you're basically spreading a rumor that RMS has a mental disorder, which is not right.
- SmirkingRevenge 7y agoThe other term people are using is "neuro-atypical". That might be a good phrase here. Whether its autism or not, its pretty clear there's a great deal of neuro-atypical happenings in that brain, and many of those clearly impinge upon his social abilities in a really extreme way. There is years of public evidence to support that (including the current crap-storm).
- Udik 7y ago> He’s autistic. Please. He's not been "autistic" in that conversation thread. He's been rational. That's not a kind of disability that needs to be excused.
- naranja 7y agoI think this is an undervalued and very important aspect in the whole discussion. In the meantime a completely mentally disabled person is leading the country and attacking every imaginable person in the world for years and… nothing happens at all! Weird times.