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I completely believe it. First of all, Stallman isn't known for hiding his opinions, or masking his version of the truth. But beyond that, Stallman has often

by reuven 13y ago

I completely believe it. First of all, Stallman isn't known for hiding his opinions, or masking his version of the truth. But beyond that, Stallman has often failed or refused to use technologies that the rest of us take for granted. Years ago, I spoke with him about a proposed bill in the US Congress that would have affected intellectual property laws. (I can't remember the specifics.) At some point, Stallman, who had strongly encouraged people to contact their representatives to oppose the bill, told me that he hadn't actually read it. I told him that it was on the Web, to which he responded, "I don't surf the Web." Now, I can understand being against certain browsers, servers, and operating systems. But to flat-out refuse to read things on the Web struck me as counterproductive. I don't know if he has changed his attitude toward the Web in the years since, but assume that when he says he doesn't use a certain technology, he means it.

belorn 13y ago
> But to flat-out refuse to read things on the Web As you described it, he did not actually flat-out refuse. He simply stated that he hasn't read all the documented published on the world wide web, since he don't "surf" the web. His approach to the web has been described many times. When someone sends him a link that they want him to read, stallman uses the program wget to download the file and reads it offline.
- reuven 13y ago
  When I specifically asked him if he had read the bill in question to which he was objecting, which was available on the Web, he said that he had not, because he doesn't surf the Web. He, not I, equated "surfing" with "reading documents." The impression I got from that conversation was that Stallman makes no effort to go out and find things that would be useful and of interest to him. I don't call that "surfing," but "research" and "responsible," especially from someone who then calls upon people to contact their public representatives. I don't care how much he hangs out on Hacker News, or elsewhere. I do care that he clearly indicated, in that conversation, that he will not do the necessary legwork (which doesn't even require using your legs) that can even help to strengthen his arguments. I also think that it's helpful for everyone to read things from opposing and diverse viewpoints. By only reading those documents that his supporters send him, I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or even change them.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    His lack of research about issues that he expresses strong opinions about leads to things like this: http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html
  - aestra 13y ago
    >I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or even change them. Of course he is! It is called confirmation bias. It is very very strong, especially with people like Stallman who hold strong beliefs. We are all guilty of it to some extent. Here's some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirmation-bias-satire-and-stephen-colbert/ http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirma... Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note 1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. ---- The most interesting is the last link. They did a study about the show The Colbert Report, which is satire, He plays a parody of conservative political pundits. The study looked at the viewer's political beliefs and what they thought of Colbert's. "More liberal participants believed Colbert was liberal and that the show was satirical. More conservative participants believed Colbert was conservative and genuinely believed his “satirical” arguments. Essentially, viewers of liberal and conservative orientations tended to perceive Colbert as supporting whatever views they personally held."
- koralatov 13y ago
  The concerning part with that anecdote is that Stallman dodged the real issue --- reading the bill he was encouraging people to complain about --- by brushing it off because of the medium through which it was available. It's not unreasonable to expect someone to have read, in part at the very least, a bill they're actively campaigning against.
  - reuven 13y ago
    Yup. That's why I remember this conversation as well as I do.
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  Has he given his reasoning for that? Does it tie into his privacy concerns? I have read a little about how his computer is air-gapped and such, but I don't remember specifics.
terhechte 13y ago
Yes, he doesn't surf the web: "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it." [1] [1] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- delluminatus 13y ago
  Is this purely for anonymity purposes, as he seems to imply? It seems like quite the workflow when a (relatively) modern anonymity tool like Tor would probably be fine. I wonder if it's deliberately complex to discourage easy, shallow browsing, or if he has some other rationale.
  - wmf 13y ago
    IIRC he uses that email-based workflow because it allows him to work offline and he spends a lot of time traveling.
  - tedks 13y ago
    RMS just has a workflow, developed probably sometime in the late 80's and nearly only involving emacs. He also uses a Lemote Yeeloong (which can barely run ancient versions of IceCat), and runs it in a tty most of the time with just emacs.
  - scenicBulimic 13y ago
    TOR is bullshit because it's a festering pile of assholes all trying to pretend that no one knows what no one is doing, without knowing who's doing the pretending not to know. C'mon, guys, I'm serious. Please don't sniff my exit node. It's not nice, you know! We're all supposed to be mysterious strangers, and not know each other, but still implicily trust all participants even though we'd never do that in real life. And oh, by the way, here's a browser bundle that still uses third party cookies, and runs javascript by default, but fuck the world, because javascript is hella convenient, and animated web pages are just super cool! Yeah, that sounds really fucking secure to me.
ewzimm 13y ago
In several instances, Stallman has asked people to complain to their representatives that bills posted online required running non-free Javascript on their computers in order to access them. I'm not sure if the instance you mention was influenced by this issue, but he does avoid reading things that require non-free software.

by reuven 13y ago

belorn 13y ago

> But to flat-out refuse to read things on the Web As you described it, he did not actually flat-out refuse. He simply stated that he hasn't read all the documented published on the world wide web, since he don't "surf" the web. His approach to the web has been described many times. When someone sends him a link that they want him to read, stallman uses the program wget to download the file and reads it offline.

reuven 13y ago
When I specifically asked him if he had read the bill in question to which he was objecting, which was available on the Web, he said that he had not, because he doesn't surf the Web. He, not I, equated "surfing" with "reading documents." The impression I got from that conversation was that Stallman makes no effort to go out and find things that would be useful and of interest to him. I don't call that "surfing," but "research" and "responsible," especially from someone who then calls upon people to contact their public representatives. I don't care how much he hangs out on Hacker News, or elsewhere. I do care that he clearly indicated, in that conversation, that he will not do the necessary legwork (which doesn't even require using your legs) that can even help to strengthen his arguments. I also think that it's helpful for everyone to read things from opposing and diverse viewpoints. By only reading those documents that his supporters send him, I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or even change them.
- leephillips 13y ago
  His lack of research about issues that he expresses strong opinions about leads to things like this: http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html http://lee-phillips.org/StallmanOnFinkelstein.html
- aestra 13y ago
  >I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or even change them. Of course he is! It is called confirmation bias. It is very very strong, especially with people like Stallman who hold strong beliefs. We are all guilty of it to some extent. Here's some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirmation-bias-satire-and-stephen-colbert/ http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirma... Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note 1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. ---- The most interesting is the last link. They did a study about the show The Colbert Report, which is satire, He plays a parody of conservative political pundits. The study looked at the viewer's political beliefs and what they thought of Colbert's. "More liberal participants believed Colbert was liberal and that the show was satirical. More conservative participants believed Colbert was conservative and genuinely believed his “satirical” arguments. Essentially, viewers of liberal and conservative orientations tended to perceive Colbert as supporting whatever views they personally held."
koralatov 13y ago
The concerning part with that anecdote is that Stallman dodged the real issue --- reading the bill he was encouraging people to complain about --- by brushing it off because of the medium through which it was available. It's not unreasonable to expect someone to have read, in part at the very least, a bill they're actively campaigning against.
- reuven 13y ago
  Yup. That's why I remember this conversation as well as I do.
evacuationdrill 13y ago
Has he given his reasoning for that? Does it tie into his privacy concerns? I have read a little about how his computer is air-gapped and such, but I don't remember specifics.

terhechte 13y ago

Yes, he doesn't surf the web: "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it." [1] [1] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

delluminatus 13y ago
Is this purely for anonymity purposes, as he seems to imply? It seems like quite the workflow when a (relatively) modern anonymity tool like Tor would probably be fine. I wonder if it's deliberately complex to discourage easy, shallow browsing, or if he has some other rationale.
- wmf 13y ago
  IIRC he uses that email-based workflow because it allows him to work offline and he spends a lot of time traveling.
- tedks 13y ago
  RMS just has a workflow, developed probably sometime in the late 80's and nearly only involving emacs. He also uses a Lemote Yeeloong (which can barely run ancient versions of IceCat), and runs it in a tty most of the time with just emacs.
- scenicBulimic 13y ago
  TOR is bullshit because it's a festering pile of assholes all trying to pretend that no one knows what no one is doing, without knowing who's doing the pretending not to know. C'mon, guys, I'm serious. Please don't sniff my exit node. It's not nice, you know! We're all supposed to be mysterious strangers, and not know each other, but still implicily trust all participants even though we'd never do that in real life. And oh, by the way, here's a browser bundle that still uses third party cookies, and runs javascript by default, but fuck the world, because javascript is hella convenient, and animated web pages are just super cool! Yeah, that sounds really fucking secure to me.

ewzimm 13y ago

In several instances, Stallman has asked people to complain to their representatives that bills posted online required running non-free Javascript on their computers in order to access them. I'm not sure if the instance you mention was influenced by this issue, but he does avoid reading things that require non-free software.