10 ms·

I'll be the odd one out and say that I see nothing wrong with their study. There are much more skillful, much better resourced actors who can do what the UMN di

I'll be the odd one out and say that I see nothing wrong with their study. There are much more skillful, much better resourced actors who can do what the UMN did much more discretely. I mean, the UMN flaws were egregious and blatantly obvious. They should have been met with ridicule at first glance. If they aren't (and they weren't), there are problems that need to be addressed. But there's a torch mob about this -- a very misled, and I would say foolish torch mob -- and as a result comments like mine will invariably be moderated down to invisible. I guess if we just brigade against some junior researchers it'll help defend the kernel from actually malicious actors...

floatingatoll 5y ago
If UMN’s ethics review(s) has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg, there would not be anything to be outraged about. The outrage, and the core ethical violation, centers around intentionally wasting the time of others for selfish benefit without appropriate review and consent.
- zajio1am 5y ago
  > If UMN’s ethics board has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg, there would not be anything to be outraged about. I do not think that would help. This was done on public mailing list and deceptive behavior was also against third parties (other reviewers). I do not think Linus/Greg can give consent to that.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Within the scope of the project, Linus and Greg absolutely could deem this acceptable on a project basis. Individual contributors might then leave the project once this comes to light, but if the project owners say “We need you to submit an 8 hour video of paint drying with every commit”, that’s their right to do so, and if they say “We chose to allow researchers to waste hours of your collective project time for a experiment”, that’s their right to do as well. If they want to guide the project down seemingly-unproductive paths because they truly think it’s worth it, then they will.
    - pvg 5y ago
      The difference is one of these gives you the opportunity to consent or opt out of the wasting of your time, the other ones doesn't. You aren't describing ethically equivalent things.
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        With an experiment of this nature, it is not always possible to get universal consent-or-refusal, due to the nature of the experiment. If you're doing an experiment with footpaths and you want to close specific paths to see how people's behavior changes, you do need to seek permission from the owner of the footpaths, and you do need to perform some sort of ethics review to ensure you aren't creating severe mobility issues for those being experimented upon, but you would never be expected to seek permission from each person traveling those footpaths to waste up to a minute of their time by closing the footpath they intended to traverse. Whether or not that time waste is acceptable is ultimately the decision of the owner/operator of the footpaths, not of the individuals using it. So, then, it is similar with a 'secret experiment upon unwitting people' and the Linux project. The owner/operators are Linus and Greg, and as the experiment cannot be pre-announced without tainting the outcomes, they are the ultimate "go or no-go" decision makers — just as the owner/operator of the footpaths would, too, have a right to refuse an experiment upon their participants. The individual Linux contributors who participate in the Linux project have no implicit authority whatsoever in any such consideration, and would not be offered opt-in or opt-out consent prior to it being performed. If the good of the project requires pentesting the processes that contributors operate, the project has every right to do so; it's for the good of the project, and contributors' time spent will have been net valuable even if the specific contributions are felt to have been "discarded" or if the contributors feel that their time was "wasted". This lack of individual authority in many respects is not comfortable or appealing for open source contributors to consider, but it's critical for us to confront it and learn lessons from it. We do not perfect authority over how open source projects use our contributions, whether in time, money, or code. Some percentage of our contributions will always end up being discarded or wasted, and sometimes that will be upsetting to contributors. These are real aspects of project participation regardless of whether secret experiments are approved by the project owners/operators or not. I hope that this event helps us develop better empathy for large projects, such as Linux or other operating systems, when they make decisions that benefit the project rather than contributors.
  - operator-name 5y ago
    In a previous thread a user suggested the following: Get consent from the project leaders and announce publicly their intentions and a time window of a few months. Then randomly submit the patches as originally outlined. Although this would not prove as strong of a result, it is far more ethical and similarly effective. Companies use this kind of method all the time.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Wouldn't Linus/Greg be heavily criticized for such cooperation then? The nature of this experiment prohibits it from total consent with the process been experimented on.
  - phnofive 5y ago
    They likely wouldn’t have cooperated with study, but advised that there is no point to it as there is no mechanism to catch the behavior they described. It sort of like asking “What if we volunteered for the parks department and slipped a load of salt into the fertilizer?” - of course bad actors can find new ways to circumvent security.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      "We found out that we have no process for confirming that we're applying the correct fertilizer to the soil in question, and accidentally salted the earth of a small patch of flowers during the test. While not ideal, the damage is small and contained and repairs are underway."
      - lazyasciiart 5y ago
        "The Parks Department responded by saying well duh, we could have told you that there was no such process, and then you would have avoided killing the flowers and wasting our time by making us check on everywhere else you were allowed to apply fertilizer".
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    No one’s discussing that, and I think that’s the most valuable question of all. Was this experiment so worthwhile that it ought to have been approved? Or was the experiment itself so irrelevant that ethical compliance or not, it shouldn’t have needed doing? Is random testing of gatekeepers an appropriate process in Linux development?
    - cycomanic 5y ago
- dekhn 5y ago
  There is no such thing as UMN ethics board, although they do have an ethics office: https://integrity.umn.edu/ethics https://integrity.umn.edu/ethics. I don't think they get individually involved in specific studies unless there's been some sort of compliance violation. It's also questionable whether the IRB should have considered this human subjects research and not given them an exemption. It's also questionable whether, if the IRB had done that, the IRB would have stopped the study or asked for revisions to the study design (they would if they were paying close enough attention). Professors at universities are typically given large amounts of freedom to conduct studies without heavy prior approval, it's a tradeoff.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    And it's a trade-off that the Linux maintainers have now justifiably called them to task on for making the trade-off in a way that pushed the cost onto external parties.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      As the top level stated, "fuck around and find out."
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Okay, “UMN’s ethics review(s)” encompasses whatever the exact ethical review process(es) are. Updated.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      ethics is mostly self-regulated; when you apply for grants, the University ensures you're not proposing to do anything illegal (risk protection for the U), but subsequently doesn't actively monitor most researchers to ensure they are being ethical. Same for publications. In those cases, the response is entirely reactive, doing investigations and actions after the problem hits the press.
- tmotwu 5y ago
  > If UMN’s ethics board has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg No, informed consent must be with all participants and maintainers reviewing the patches. Why does Linus/Greg get to decide that for others?
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    That is not as cut and dried a decision as you frame it to be. California emissions testing for vehicles includes licensed smog test stations and a process where undercover inspectors bring cars that are in violation to those stations. If the smog test station is incompetent, they will be cited and perhaps stripped of their operating license. If another state decided that they’d like to start performing random tests upon their network of smog test stations, without any retaliation to those stations, then it would not be a violation of ethics for that state to send undercover cars through the stations. It would be unethical to punish those who fail undercover tests, unless the state had announced that random undercover testing was beginning and that punishments would be applied for failures. The researchers were not attempting to modify the behavior of the participants, nor did they seem to be interested in naming and shaming specific maintainers, so it’s not as simple as “anyone who comes into contact with the experiment must be fully informed”.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      A professor is not a government. Also, all governments will use uncover officers without warning first.
      - floatingatoll 5y ago
        The analogy is from California to Linus/Greg, not UMN.
    - quickthrowman 5y ago
      California controls the licenses for smog test stations. I would imagine there’s a clause in the contract that says “California, at any time, may do random undercover inspections of the smog testing facility to ensure compliance” which the owner of the licensed smog station would be aware of. Do you see how that differs from an academic randomly experimenting on an open source project with no notice or warning? Retail store owners/managers contract out “mystery shoppers” to test compliance with retail store policy and procedure. This example is also nothing like the UMN experimenting on Linux, since there’s a contract and both parties are aware. A similar example to the UMN/Linux situation would be an academic doctor deciding to randomly test blood donor screening by sending in HIV positive people to lie about their status in order to donate tainted blood and only telling the Red Cross or whoever after the blood has been donated.
- presentation 5y ago
  Somehow I feel that wasting some developer time in a situation where informing all the parties involved would have probably undermined the research itself, is a lot less of a ethical breach than full blown coerced human experimentation with permanent effects on those people's lives, which this research is being compared to. The outrage on HN about this experiment has been mind-boggling to me, how sacred people hold keeping the Linux kernel and its maintainers' time pristine. And ultimately it seems that the research was useful, given the blast radius it produced.
  - DreamScatter 5y ago
    Time wasted is a permanent effect that cannot be recovered, so your argument falls apart.
rideontime 5y ago
What a rhetorical power move it is to preemptively decry "torch mobs" for having your comment disapproved of. You might also consider the possibility that you'll get downvoted for suggesting that "ridicule" is an appropriate response in a code review.
- defaultname 5y ago
  Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but the "torch mobs" have been pretty active as this situation has unfolded. There is nothing "preemptive" about it. The zeitgeist is pretty obvious. As to the "ridicule", putting aside the out of place attempt to moral high ground about a rhetorical turn of phrase, yes their commits were so egregiously flawed that ridicule was the only response.
ampdepolymerase 5y ago
When a state level attacker carries out a successful attack via the kernel, then the developer community will hide behind shocked_pikachu.jpeg and call for more social engineering and red team training for the Linux foundation. Until then, people are happy being complacent and any attempt to change the status quo will be met with hostility.
kortilla 5y ago
Your comment will be downmodded because you mentioned it in advance and you haven’t actually stated why you think it was fine to abuse the open source maintainers other than “someone else can do it”. “I beat my kids so some weirdo on the street doesn’t!”
balozi 5y ago
Their particular problem in this case is that they are researchers at a reputable university. They are not supposed to be caught doing this, ever. Poorly supervised students coupled to disinterested faculty advisors is the recipe for this sort of non-sense.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Actually the supervisor was directly involved in this. I think it's much more the high pressure publish or perish culture, possibly coupled with the pressures of tenure-track hiring (I'm not entirely sure if the supervisor was already tenured).
zajio1am 5y ago
> I'll be the odd one out and say that I see nothing wrong with their study. There are much more skillful, much better resourced actors who can do what the UMN did much more discretely. Puting these patches under false pretense is deceptive behavior to other people, that is problematic regardless of whether the intent is malicious or just doing research.
drknownuffin 5y ago
I agree strongly. People demanding this be pursued in criminal court are seriously getting bent out of shape. "We can mob these people because they're super in the wrong and also utterly helpless to defend themselves against my righteous fury," is ridiculous. They made an ethical blunder, but this wasn't Tuskegee 2.0.
simion314 5y ago
Seems more ethical and positive experiment to have the students to work with historical data, you can find a metric on how easy it is to slip a bug into the kernel, maybe they could identify problematic trends like time of day/year when bugs can slip in, or time before a release. Do we really need someone to prove that a malicious backdoor can be added? since real bugs happen then it is clear that the system is not perfect, Imagine this would be allowed, then all contributions would need to be checked not for the regular kind of problems but for all those stealthy tricks, so instead of working on the kernel you would need to attempt to find on how each commit is truing to trick you , or maybe this is fine on it's own but is part of a bigger plan.
dang 5y ago
> and as a result comments like mine will invariably be moderated down to invisible. Please don't downvote-bait or superciliously posture like that. It degrades discussion noticeably and breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note the second-last one. Also this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Also this one: "Don't be snarky."
- abnry 5y ago
  Okay, but he gets a comment from you and avoids a faded out comment. If his comment was simply faded out, you would not have replied. Frankly, you need to recognize that there is a mob mentality on this topic and that legitimate comments are getting downvoted.
  - dang 5y ago
    The way to respond to a mob mentality is to respectfully supply correct information and patiently make correct arguments. That may not work, mobs being what they are, but the solution is not to lash out in frustration, call names and fulminate. That's worse in every respect: it inflames the mob, damages the commons, and gives readers even more reason to reject whatever truth you're advocating (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Discrediting your minority view while at the same time damaging the community we all depend on is self-defeating behavior. The only reason we do it is because it's extremely frustrating to feel outnumbered by people who hold a wrong view (or one we feel is wrong). We all need to find ways to process that frustration in ourselves, before we can't stand it anymore and get propelled into the comments to seek relief. The relief of venting is short-lived and soon comes back worse, in the classic way that addicts need a higher dose the next time. I don't mean to pick on you or mumblemumble personally. We're all addicts in this sense, and it's in all our interests to find a better way. This experience of frustration is extremely common, as we all know—the internet being, to a first approximation, wrong about everything.
    - 5y ago
dsr_ 5y ago
You completely ignore the issue of consent. The UMN has placed itself on the same level as those miscreants, because they screwed up in several different ways. Finally, maturity is, in large part, knowing the difference between having a capability and exercising it. As an institution, the UMN has revealed itself to be immature. What they do about it now determines how they will be treated in future.
ric2b 5y ago
They acted just like actual malicious actors by not letting anyone know or asking for consent on their experiment. Try robbing a bank and then claiming you were just testing their security and it was just for research, see how well that works out.

floatingatoll 5y ago

If UMN’s ethics review(s) has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg, there would not be anything to be outraged about. The outrage, and the core ethical violation, centers around intentionally wasting the time of others for selfish benefit without appropriate review and consent.

zajio1am 5y ago
> If UMN’s ethics board has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg, there would not be anything to be outraged about. I do not think that would help. This was done on public mailing list and deceptive behavior was also against third parties (other reviewers). I do not think Linus/Greg can give consent to that.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Within the scope of the project, Linus and Greg absolutely could deem this acceptable on a project basis. Individual contributors might then leave the project once this comes to light, but if the project owners say “We need you to submit an 8 hour video of paint drying with every commit”, that’s their right to do so, and if they say “We chose to allow researchers to waste hours of your collective project time for a experiment”, that’s their right to do as well. If they want to guide the project down seemingly-unproductive paths because they truly think it’s worth it, then they will.
  - pvg 5y ago
    The difference is one of these gives you the opportunity to consent or opt out of the wasting of your time, the other ones doesn't. You aren't describing ethically equivalent things.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      With an experiment of this nature, it is not always possible to get universal consent-or-refusal, due to the nature of the experiment. If you're doing an experiment with footpaths and you want to close specific paths to see how people's behavior changes, you do need to seek permission from the owner of the footpaths, and you do need to perform some sort of ethics review to ensure you aren't creating severe mobility issues for those being experimented upon, but you would never be expected to seek permission from each person traveling those footpaths to waste up to a minute of their time by closing the footpath they intended to traverse. Whether or not that time waste is acceptable is ultimately the decision of the owner/operator of the footpaths, not of the individuals using it. So, then, it is similar with a 'secret experiment upon unwitting people' and the Linux project. The owner/operators are Linus and Greg, and as the experiment cannot be pre-announced without tainting the outcomes, they are the ultimate "go or no-go" decision makers — just as the owner/operator of the footpaths would, too, have a right to refuse an experiment upon their participants. The individual Linux contributors who participate in the Linux project have no implicit authority whatsoever in any such consideration, and would not be offered opt-in or opt-out consent prior to it being performed. If the good of the project requires pentesting the processes that contributors operate, the project has every right to do so; it's for the good of the project, and contributors' time spent will have been net valuable even if the specific contributions are felt to have been "discarded" or if the contributors feel that their time was "wasted". This lack of individual authority in many respects is not comfortable or appealing for open source contributors to consider, but it's critical for us to confront it and learn lessons from it. We do not perfect authority over how open source projects use our contributions, whether in time, money, or code. Some percentage of our contributions will always end up being discarded or wasted, and sometimes that will be upsetting to contributors. These are real aspects of project participation regardless of whether secret experiments are approved by the project owners/operators or not. I hope that this event helps us develop better empathy for large projects, such as Linux or other operating systems, when they make decisions that benefit the project rather than contributors.
- operator-name 5y ago
  In a previous thread a user suggested the following: Get consent from the project leaders and announce publicly their intentions and a time window of a few months. Then randomly submit the patches as originally outlined. Although this would not prove as strong of a result, it is far more ethical and similarly effective. Companies use this kind of method all the time.
temp8964 5y ago
Wouldn't Linus/Greg be heavily criticized for such cooperation then? The nature of this experiment prohibits it from total consent with the process been experimented on.
- phnofive 5y ago
  They likely wouldn’t have cooperated with study, but advised that there is no point to it as there is no mechanism to catch the behavior they described. It sort of like asking “What if we volunteered for the parks department and slipped a load of salt into the fertilizer?” - of course bad actors can find new ways to circumvent security.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    "We found out that we have no process for confirming that we're applying the correct fertilizer to the soil in question, and accidentally salted the earth of a small patch of flowers during the test. While not ideal, the damage is small and contained and repairs are underway."
    - lazyasciiart 5y ago
      "The Parks Department responded by saying well duh, we could have told you that there was no such process, and then you would have avoided killing the flowers and wasting our time by making us check on everywhere else you were allowed to apply fertilizer".
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  No one’s discussing that, and I think that’s the most valuable question of all. Was this experiment so worthwhile that it ought to have been approved? Or was the experiment itself so irrelevant that ethical compliance or not, it shouldn’t have needed doing? Is random testing of gatekeepers an appropriate process in Linux development?
  - cycomanic 5y ago
dekhn 5y ago
There is no such thing as UMN ethics board, although they do have an ethics office: https://integrity.umn.edu/ethics https://integrity.umn.edu/ethics. I don't think they get individually involved in specific studies unless there's been some sort of compliance violation. It's also questionable whether the IRB should have considered this human subjects research and not given them an exemption. It's also questionable whether, if the IRB had done that, the IRB would have stopped the study or asked for revisions to the study design (they would if they were paying close enough attention). Professors at universities are typically given large amounts of freedom to conduct studies without heavy prior approval, it's a tradeoff.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  And it's a trade-off that the Linux maintainers have now justifiably called them to task on for making the trade-off in a way that pushed the cost onto external parties.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    As the top level stated, "fuck around and find out."
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Okay, “UMN’s ethics review(s)” encompasses whatever the exact ethical review process(es) are. Updated.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    ethics is mostly self-regulated; when you apply for grants, the University ensures you're not proposing to do anything illegal (risk protection for the U), but subsequently doesn't actively monitor most researchers to ensure they are being ethical. Same for publications. In those cases, the response is entirely reactive, doing investigations and actions after the problem hits the press.
tmotwu 5y ago
> If UMN’s ethics board has approved this experiment in cooperation with Linus/Greg No, informed consent must be with all participants and maintainers reviewing the patches. Why does Linus/Greg get to decide that for others?
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  That is not as cut and dried a decision as you frame it to be. California emissions testing for vehicles includes licensed smog test stations and a process where undercover inspectors bring cars that are in violation to those stations. If the smog test station is incompetent, they will be cited and perhaps stripped of their operating license. If another state decided that they’d like to start performing random tests upon their network of smog test stations, without any retaliation to those stations, then it would not be a violation of ethics for that state to send undercover cars through the stations. It would be unethical to punish those who fail undercover tests, unless the state had announced that random undercover testing was beginning and that punishments would be applied for failures. The researchers were not attempting to modify the behavior of the participants, nor did they seem to be interested in naming and shaming specific maintainers, so it’s not as simple as “anyone who comes into contact with the experiment must be fully informed”.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    A professor is not a government. Also, all governments will use uncover officers without warning first.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      The analogy is from California to Linus/Greg, not UMN.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    California controls the licenses for smog test stations. I would imagine there’s a clause in the contract that says “California, at any time, may do random undercover inspections of the smog testing facility to ensure compliance” which the owner of the licensed smog station would be aware of. Do you see how that differs from an academic randomly experimenting on an open source project with no notice or warning? Retail store owners/managers contract out “mystery shoppers” to test compliance with retail store policy and procedure. This example is also nothing like the UMN experimenting on Linux, since there’s a contract and both parties are aware. A similar example to the UMN/Linux situation would be an academic doctor deciding to randomly test blood donor screening by sending in HIV positive people to lie about their status in order to donate tainted blood and only telling the Red Cross or whoever after the blood has been donated.
presentation 5y ago
Somehow I feel that wasting some developer time in a situation where informing all the parties involved would have probably undermined the research itself, is a lot less of a ethical breach than full blown coerced human experimentation with permanent effects on those people's lives, which this research is being compared to. The outrage on HN about this experiment has been mind-boggling to me, how sacred people hold keeping the Linux kernel and its maintainers' time pristine. And ultimately it seems that the research was useful, given the blast radius it produced.
- DreamScatter 5y ago
  Time wasted is a permanent effect that cannot be recovered, so your argument falls apart.

rideontime 5y ago

What a rhetorical power move it is to preemptively decry "torch mobs" for having your comment disapproved of. You might also consider the possibility that you'll get downvoted for suggesting that "ridicule" is an appropriate response in a code review.

defaultname 5y ago
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but the "torch mobs" have been pretty active as this situation has unfolded. There is nothing "preemptive" about it. The zeitgeist is pretty obvious. As to the "ridicule", putting aside the out of place attempt to moral high ground about a rhetorical turn of phrase, yes their commits were so egregiously flawed that ridicule was the only response.

ampdepolymerase 5y ago

When a state level attacker carries out a successful attack via the kernel, then the developer community will hide behind shocked_pikachu.jpeg and call for more social engineering and red team training for the Linux foundation. Until then, people are happy being complacent and any attempt to change the status quo will be met with hostility.

kortilla 5y ago

Your comment will be downmodded because you mentioned it in advance and you haven’t actually stated why you think it was fine to abuse the open source maintainers other than “someone else can do it”. “I beat my kids so some weirdo on the street doesn’t!”

balozi 5y ago

Their particular problem in this case is that they are researchers at a reputable university. They are not supposed to be caught doing this, ever. Poorly supervised students coupled to disinterested faculty advisors is the recipe for this sort of non-sense.

cycomanic 5y ago
Actually the supervisor was directly involved in this. I think it's much more the high pressure publish or perish culture, possibly coupled with the pressures of tenure-track hiring (I'm not entirely sure if the supervisor was already tenured).

zajio1am 5y ago

> I'll be the odd one out and say that I see nothing wrong with their study. There are much more skillful, much better resourced actors who can do what the UMN did much more discretely. Puting these patches under false pretense is deceptive behavior to other people, that is problematic regardless of whether the intent is malicious or just doing research.

drknownuffin 5y ago

I agree strongly. People demanding this be pursued in criminal court are seriously getting bent out of shape. "We can mob these people because they're super in the wrong and also utterly helpless to defend themselves against my righteous fury," is ridiculous. They made an ethical blunder, but this wasn't Tuskegee 2.0.

simion314 5y ago

Seems more ethical and positive experiment to have the students to work with historical data, you can find a metric on how easy it is to slip a bug into the kernel, maybe they could identify problematic trends like time of day/year when bugs can slip in, or time before a release. Do we really need someone to prove that a malicious backdoor can be added? since real bugs happen then it is clear that the system is not perfect, Imagine this would be allowed, then all contributions would need to be checked not for the regular kind of problems but for all those stealthy tricks, so instead of working on the kernel you would need to attempt to find on how each commit is truing to trick you , or maybe this is fine on it's own but is part of a bigger plan.

dang 5y ago

> and as a result comments like mine will invariably be moderated down to invisible. Please don't downvote-bait or superciliously posture like that. It degrades discussion noticeably and breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note the second-last one. Also this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." Also this one: "Don't be snarky."

abnry 5y ago
Okay, but he gets a comment from you and avoids a faded out comment. If his comment was simply faded out, you would not have replied. Frankly, you need to recognize that there is a mob mentality on this topic and that legitimate comments are getting downvoted.
- dang 5y ago
  The way to respond to a mob mentality is to respectfully supply correct information and patiently make correct arguments. That may not work, mobs being what they are, but the solution is not to lash out in frustration, call names and fulminate. That's worse in every respect: it inflames the mob, damages the commons, and gives readers even more reason to reject whatever truth you're advocating (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Discrediting your minority view while at the same time damaging the community we all depend on is self-defeating behavior. The only reason we do it is because it's extremely frustrating to feel outnumbered by people who hold a wrong view (or one we feel is wrong). We all need to find ways to process that frustration in ourselves, before we can't stand it anymore and get propelled into the comments to seek relief. The relief of venting is short-lived and soon comes back worse, in the classic way that addicts need a higher dose the next time. I don't mean to pick on you or mumblemumble personally. We're all addicts in this sense, and it's in all our interests to find a better way. This experience of frustration is extremely common, as we all know—the internet being, to a first approximation, wrong about everything.
  - 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago

You completely ignore the issue of consent. The UMN has placed itself on the same level as those miscreants, because they screwed up in several different ways. Finally, maturity is, in large part, knowing the difference between having a capability and exercising it. As an institution, the UMN has revealed itself to be immature. What they do about it now determines how they will be treated in future.

ric2b 5y ago

They acted just like actual malicious actors by not letting anyone know or asking for consent on their experiment. Try robbing a bank and then claiming you were just testing their security and it was just for research, see how well that works out.