5 ms·

It's also part of the job of a journalist to not deceive their readers. But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way

by deogeo 7y ago

It's also part of the job of a journalist to not deceive their readers. But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible...

geofft 7y ago
> But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible... That is literally the job description, yes. Sure, you will sometimes fail at it. Sure, I will sometimes write bugs in my code. If I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production, my employer would be justified in firing me - not because I wrote bugs, everyone writes bugs sometimes, but because I made no effort to avoid them. Similarly, the occasional gaffe is understandable, but using your official work email address to talk at length on irrelevant subjects in ways that are easy to misinterpret is being deliberately irresponsible. You should hold journalists accountable for telling wrong stories, but you should also expect that journalists, too, will get things wrong sometime. The robustness principle indicates that you'll have a better time in practice being careful and precise about what you say than having high expectations about how others interpret it.
- panny 7y ago
  Headline news: geofft@HN states, "I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production" and goes on to say "my employer would be justified in firing me" - - vice.com
  - geofft 7y ago
    That's fine, because such a story is implausible to anyone who knows me or has heard of me. Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? (Also, my job is technical and not PR, and I have been arguing consistently that both RMS and the free software movement would have been better off if he had made himself a role that was primarily technical and not PR.)
    - deogeo 7y ago
      > Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? Even free-speech extremists such as myself and the US Supreme Court don't support libel.
      - geofft 7y ago
        I've long suspected that people who virtue signal about free speech don't actually believe in it nearly as much as the people who genuinely have something to say.
        panny 7y ago
        And now you have proof; The "it's free as in speech" FSF has fired their founder for something he said.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
"But I guess we're going to let that slide": I hope you realize that, with that phrase, you are exactly doing to geofft what you complain about the journalists doing - you're distorting his words to make them say something that they didn't say.

by deogeo 7y ago

geofft 7y ago

> But I guess we're going to let that slide, and demand public figures speak in such a way that is impossible to misrepresent or take wrongly out of context. Assuming that's even possible... That is literally the job description, yes. Sure, you will sometimes fail at it. Sure, I will sometimes write bugs in my code. If I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production, my employer would be justified in firing me - not because I wrote bugs, everyone writes bugs sometimes, but because I made no effort to avoid them. Similarly, the occasional gaffe is understandable, but using your official work email address to talk at length on irrelevant subjects in ways that are easy to misinterpret is being deliberately irresponsible. You should hold journalists accountable for telling wrong stories, but you should also expect that journalists, too, will get things wrong sometime. The robustness principle indicates that you'll have a better time in practice being careful and precise about what you say than having high expectations about how others interpret it.

panny 7y ago
Headline news: geofft@HN states, "I deliberately write code without tests and ignore code review and cause problems in production" and goes on to say "my employer would be justified in firing me" - - vice.com
- geofft 7y ago
  That's fine, because such a story is implausible to anyone who knows me or has heard of me. Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? (Also, my job is technical and not PR, and I have been arguing consistently that both RMS and the free software movement would have been better off if he had made himself a role that was primarily technical and not PR.)
  - deogeo 7y ago
    > Go ahead and publish it. I support your right to free speech. Do you? Even free-speech extremists such as myself and the US Supreme Court don't support libel.
    - geofft 7y ago
      I've long suspected that people who virtue signal about free speech don't actually believe in it nearly as much as the people who genuinely have something to say.
      - panny 7y ago
        And now you have proof; The "it's free as in speech" FSF has fired their founder for something he said.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

"But I guess we're going to let that slide": I hope you realize that, with that phrase, you are exactly doing to geofft what you complain about the journalists doing - you're distorting his words to make them say something that they didn't say.