Not Working for Us (Preparing to Discuss Jacob Applebaum at CCC) | Hacker News Reader

Not Working for Us (Preparing to Discuss Jacob Applebaum at CCC)

medium.com

38 pointsj_s23 comments

Good article by Isaacson. I would add I think it would be good if the CCCers got some outside consultation, both from people in the sex abuse field, and at least one person who is an expert on sociopaths, since that is what it seems JA is.

I think it would also helpful would be helpful to learn communication skills like active listening and the ones in Marshall Rosenberg's book Nonviolent Communication.

The problem with this sort of thing is that when the pendulum swings the other way then we have a different set of problems. Large subcultures invite sociopaths as there is a population there to exploit. At the end of the day you have to be good at detecting those sort of people, and it's incredibly hard. Eventually though the group identifies and weeds them out. But they exist amongst us and many of them are respected members of their respective communities.

They are good at getting up there in status and because of status deflecting blame from themselves. It's hard to challenge them even if you know them for who they are, the masses will not see it until they have already done a bunch of damage to the community.

In order to get along people have to give other people benefit of doubt. And that's a opening for a skilled manipulator to play people. It's part and parcel of dealing with human beings.

But if you read the long Zeit article[1] and esp. the latest taz article[2] it becomes clear that the other party consists also of psychopaths whose actions were even more dangerous.

[1] http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-08/jacob-appelbaum-rape-sexua...

[2] https://www.taz.de/!5361578/

As mentioned in the Medium article:

"The unvoiced threat I understood was that Jake was willing to (directly or via proxies) coordinate the initiation of a police investigation, leak it to a friendly journalist, and destroy my life if I talked.

We ended with a hug and a promise to engage again.

Weeks later, a German journalist published a long, well-sourced story, clearly (to me) coordinated by Jake or one of his circle, casually describing Jake providing illegal drugs to party attendees. The sword, it seems, is out of its sheath."

Who says these aren't some of Appelbaums German friends in journalism?

The link just reinforces what I am saying. You have a community with some bad social norms, and many people in it are now realizing it and trying to change the whole group.

Let me add that there are two competing stories here. One is that JA is a sociopath, and got away with it because of the norms of the group, but now people are changing and rejecting such behavior.

The other is that the females in question all thought for years that JA's behavior was fine, or at least not very bad, and then all of them, for some unaccountable reason, went crazy at the same time and irrationally decided to persecute him and him alone.

I find the first story a whole lot more plausible than the second.

Everybody deserves justice. I don't think Medium posts and a lynch mob are the way this is achieved. Get the police involved when a crime is committed. Enough with the hearsay character assassinations. This time, the author even admits that he's conflicted and that his memory isn't completely reliable. So as somebody from the "out-group" it's hard to take it as seriously as it probably should be taken :(

Edit: Instead of spawning a discussion, I should have guessed this would be downvoted immediately for not representing SJW values. Sorry to disappoint.

There's a bit of a thin-skinned-ness to editing your own post to complain about downvoting. (I get downvoted sometimes. Honestly, who the fuck cares?)

To answer the substantive point you make, I think the hyperbole of "lynch mob" is a bit overused in these circumstances. Historically, lynch mobs hung (often innocent) victims from trees. Writing Medium posts isn't exactly equivalent.

So what exactly is your complaint? That Jacob wasn't (also) prosecuted? I share that complaint, but prosecutions for acquaintance rape are fairly rare and fairly difficult, unfortunately.

Or is your complaint that Jacob is subject to public criticism in this regard? For that I have less sympathy; the American standards for defamation and libel--which require falsehood and intentional maliciousness--strike me as taking the right balance here. If you cannot (for whatever reason) be successfully prosecuted, you have a tough time making the case that accusers should not be allowed to air their accusations publicly. (What you can do--and what Jacob has done vigorously--is mount your own public counter-argument, and leave it to readers to decide who's telling the truth.)

For what it's worth, I agree with you that this essay, lacking much in the way of firsthand testimony, is not especially helpful, but everyone can air their own reaction however they desire, I guess.

> There's a bit of a thin-skinned-ness to editing your own post to complain about downvoting. (I get downvoted sometimes. Honestly, who the fuck cares?)

Yeah, but it worked! Shit, maybe that's the equivalent to click-bait. I see it as a community service though. Downvoting helps if something is factually wrong. But if you downvote because you disagree, but then don't articulate that, you aren't helping anyone. You're doing it to feel smug.

> I think the hyperbole of "lynch mob" is a bit overused

It's true, but it is kind of career-destroying. At least for me it would be, I'm not so teflon.

My complaint is you have to be really careful publishing stuff like this for public consumption, which it is. What are we supposed to do with this information? By putting it out there, he's expecting some kind of response, right? But will he get the response he wants? Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's out.

I mean, worst case, most people ignore it, nothing gets done, and if/when it comes to a trial Mr. Applebaum's lawyers say: "Oh, person <x> has been badmouthing us for years, he's biased, his testimony is unreliable." Shit. Now you're one step further away from "justice".

I agree it can be career-destroying. And in the cases where the public makes a decision that is counterfactual--when they believe a smear that is not true--that obviously is a miscarriage of informal justice, as it were.

Where we disagree, I think (the specifics of this case aside; I don't think the public reaction in this case is counterfactual) is in precisely what moral "should" applies to such public discussions.

Does the risk that the public may be misled mean we should have no open discussions of accusations of criminality? Clearly not, I think--especially when it comes to miscarriages of the formal system of justice, transparency is the only recourse. (Imagine how different our discussions of criminal justice reform would be if we did not have access to statistics showing the racial imbalance in the American justice system!)

So what's your exact claim here? That the whole thing is unseemly? I guess it is, a bit. (Would it be less so if the alleged crime were less prurient?) But are you suggesting this should not be on Hackernews? (I don't have a strong opinion on that; this place isn't my playground, but rather someone else's.)

I guess it's not clear to me what you're exactly arguing. (And conversely, my only point was that in general there's no clear stricture against public accusations of criminality, as long as they are not defamatory, and that in general society probably benefits from those who are unsuccessful in the legal system being able to make such accusations publicly.)

> SJW values

What does this mean?

Uppity subalterns and fellow travelers.

SJW is most commonly used as a pejorative term these days, and it's anyone's guess what it's supposed to represent other than "people who aren't agreeing with me."

I didn't just mean "people who aren't agreeing with me", but specifically people who disagree but who try and use some kind of censorship or shaming to silence disagreements, instead of engaging in them. AFAIK, this is a common tactic of the mentioned group. (At the time of the edit, I had no replies but like -5. Not that it really matters.)

Disagreement is constructive at some level, and so it's a good thing in my opinion.

What "mentioned group"? - I don't think many/any people think of themselves as SJWs now that it's pejorative and widely applied to people who never thought of themselves that way.

It's not so much one group as an ideology spread though media and academia, but some did try to take on the label sincerely in an attempt to reclaim its reputation (Guardian columnist Laurie Penny comes to mind). Regardless, columnists like Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, industry professionals (see LambdaConf) and cling-ons (Shanley Kane, Adria Richards), activist students (like Emma Sulkowicz) and professors (like AW Peet) have sought their pound of blood from Professors (Jordan Peterson), scientists (Tim Hunt, Matt Taylor) and professionals (Brendan Eich). Accusations of fascism get thrown around, censorship is demanded, careers and families are targeted. Usually under the guise of morality and standing up to bullies, despite the timeline of events and what equal application of policy would say.

They are excellent as seeing themselves on the right side of history, and they were the ones who pioneered the kind of mobbing and shaming techniques online that they consider to be harassment and violence when the shoe is on the other foot.

This post itself may be closer to agreeing with you than not:

The reaction of our community’s “immune system” was notably severe in this case; rather than doing it this way next time, we need to develop more compassionate systems to deal with problems earlier.

I agree that the police should be involved when a crime is committed. The problem, according to Isaacson is that the whole CCC community has a set of social norms that have been preventing that. However, people seem to be realizing that, and are starting to work to change the norms. I am glad to hear that, and I think it is good he wrote about that since this problem is certainly found in many other groups.

There is something else. Yes, the police should be called when a crime occurs, but there are lots of sexual behaviors that are not strictly crimes but are still morally wrong. The main way to prevent crimes from happening in the first place is to have clear community norms against the lesser offences. Wouldn't you agree? And the only way that ever happens is through a whole lot of discussion within the community.

>Enough with the hearsay character assassinations. This time, the author even admits that he's conflicted and that his memory isn't completely reliable.

He said he personally witnessed many abusive episodes himself. And he spoke to many others who had personally been abused. That is not hearsay, which is when someone tells you something they claim someone else said. Instead it is exactly the sort of discussions that have to happen when a community is making a major change in its norms.

> The problem, according to Isaacson is that the whole CCC community has a set of social norms that have been preventing that.

While I didn't read that out of the article clearly, I have heard it before, and it's definitely a danger of the self-reliance hacker ethos. This is a fair point, and one your other comment addresses nicely.

> The main way to prevent crimes from happening in the first place is to have clear community norms against the lesser offences. Wouldn't you agree?

Well, you can't protect everybody. If what he says it true, he let people know not to sleep with Applebaum, and they still decided to. I don't find this hard to believe, but such is life. (Male) murderers in prison get loads of (female) fan mail. So does the community need to police this, or let individuals decide for themselves with a reasonable amount of facts? I'm a pretty careful person and tend towards caution, but I get that not everybody is like me. But community "policing" isn't the right answer for free will IMO. This only holds as long as nobody was mislead I guess.

> He said he personally witnessed many abusive episodes himself. [...] Instead it is exactly the sort of discussions that have to happen when a community is making a major change in its norms.

Sure, but putting them in a Medium post is hardly reliable. Or at least, it's different and editorialised than if it were under oath or cross-examination. I'm not stupid enough to think the "truth" exists or that we could find it. But I am a bit weary of throwing it out there, into the public, outside of "the community". What is the general public to do with this information? Think Jacob Applebaum is a monster? Or ignore it? Is it factual? There's so many questions here that make it very hard to deal with the material properly, if that's even possible.

Lots of things are criminalized that shouldn't be, I think CCC crowd holds that position pretty firmly as well.

If a group of people trust the testimony of the claimed victims and collectively agree to disavow of the conduct of the alleged perpetrator, what's wrong with them all choosing to reject that person? Why does the state (police) have to be involved in everything? Are you saying the state's verdict is always correct, and nobody should disagree with anyone who hasn't been convicted by the state?

Exactly. And let me add that you can have police force that works for justice only if the larger society has a whole lot of good norms that are enforced informally. If you don't have that, then the police will just be a bunch of thugs, as is the case in many countries.

"Edit: Instead of spawning a discussion, I should have guessed this would be downvoted immediately for not representing SJW values. Sorry to disappoint."

I think it's important to have told you why I downvoted. I just downvoted you for this passive-aggressive childishness. The rest of your post seemed reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com