4 ms·

Why couldn't you simply respect the author's wish to leave the text private?

mcbuilder 4y ago
I agree with you in principle, but the second you make a public blog post, especially a controversial one, these days assume it's public forever. Someone intelligent enough to do attempt a PhD should know this. Him making it private was a futile attempt based in naïveté. I've been in a similar position, saying something incendiary on a large corporation's public intranet comment section. What I said was more objective and pointing to a specific instance that was very fair to criticize and ultimately damaging to the company, but the next day I was well aware the cat was out of the bag I needed to defend my position with logic and reason and not try and hide it. In fact I emailed my manager immediately the next morning, saying that I was worried about the blowback and linking to the comment. I feel for the author, because the anxiety was definitely a ohh shit moment. Looking back, I probably shouldn't have made the public comment in the first place because it was emotionally driven and it did hurt my advancement.
- zekrioca 4y ago
  Yes, and I think the author also realized the same causal relationship of a given position and that's when the person removed the text. And that's also how one can see the person did not think about this when opting to join a PhD program.
  - iqkznnft 4y ago
tomatowurst 4y ago
No implicit agreement to privacy can exist on the internet. Once you click publish, its archived. I wanted to read what the author wrote. https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
- zekrioca 4y ago
  It depends. The author should also have the Right to be forgotten, which applies to some jurisdictions, specially in this situation that the matter may have not been set. But I still disagree with you not respecting the author's implicit wish. For instance, thanks to the various similar links like the one you just sent, I can pin-point exactly who the person in question is. How can you guarantee the information will not be used against the person? I'm not sure if this is on your ethical framework to consider, but that's where I see the fundamental disagreement. You could have privately read the text (because you know how to access it), while not posting the text per-se here, and you could even comment something insightful about it. It is more about the anthropological aspect of it, the respect of privacy, not about the technical aspects of the public town-square that the Internet is. Clearly the author did not know any of these either, nor about what a PhD actually entails. But still, these are mistakes that can be part of someone's life.
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    Are you blaming me that archive.org crawls the web and makes archives?
    - zekrioca 4y ago
      No, I'm just inferring your ethical framework for this specific situation. Shedding more light into a matter that is not settled yet is not appropriate at this time, specially because the author is the vulnerable person in question.
      - tomatowurst 4y ago
        and you know this because you've spoken to the author?
        zekrioca 4y ago
        No, but there is a (public) status of the PhD position.

I agree with you in principle, but the second you make a public blog post, especially a controversial one, these days assume it's public forever. Someone intelligent enough to do attempt a PhD should know this. Him making it private was a futile attempt based in naïveté. I've been in a similar position, saying something incendiary on a large corporation's public intranet comment section. What I said was more objective and pointing to a specific instance that was very fair to criticize and ultimately damaging to the company, but the next day I was well aware the cat was out of the bag I needed to defend my position with logic and reason and not try and hide it. In fact I emailed my manager immediately the next morning, saying that I was worried about the blowback and linking to the comment. I feel for the author, because the anxiety was definitely a ohh shit moment. Looking back, I probably shouldn't have made the public comment in the first place because it was emotionally driven and it did hurt my advancement.

zekrioca 4y ago
Yes, and I think the author also realized the same causal relationship of a given position and that's when the person removed the text. And that's also how one can see the person did not think about this when opting to join a PhD program.
- iqkznnft 4y ago

tomatowurst 4y ago

No implicit agreement to privacy can exist on the internet. Once you click publish, its archived. I wanted to read what the author wrote. https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...

zekrioca 4y ago
It depends. The author should also have the Right to be forgotten, which applies to some jurisdictions, specially in this situation that the matter may have not been set. But I still disagree with you not respecting the author's implicit wish. For instance, thanks to the various similar links like the one you just sent, I can pin-point exactly who the person in question is. How can you guarantee the information will not be used against the person? I'm not sure if this is on your ethical framework to consider, but that's where I see the fundamental disagreement. You could have privately read the text (because you know how to access it), while not posting the text per-se here, and you could even comment something insightful about it. It is more about the anthropological aspect of it, the respect of privacy, not about the technical aspects of the public town-square that the Internet is. Clearly the author did not know any of these either, nor about what a PhD actually entails. But still, these are mistakes that can be part of someone's life.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  Are you blaming me that archive.org crawls the web and makes archives?
  - zekrioca 4y ago
    No, I'm just inferring your ethical framework for this specific situation. Shedding more light into a matter that is not settled yet is not appropriate at this time, specially because the author is the vulnerable person in question.
    - tomatowurst 4y ago
      and you know this because you've spoken to the author?
      - zekrioca 4y ago
        No, but there is a (public) status of the PhD position.