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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

He previously got caught up in an internet drama. It's hard to summarize, but he made a comment about how being a nerdy straight male was harder than being a woman or gay and how reading feminist books made him suicidal. He got a bit of blowback on that and so probably a reference to that:

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

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To add a bit more context, his comment is highly personal and deals with how he felt ashamed of his sexuality during his childhood and teenage years. His self-loathing was apparently so bad that he asked a doctor to chemically castrate him. His comments need to be read in the context of his life, because unlike the infamous memo they were highly personal, and that makes them hard to summarise fairly.

I really like his blog, even if it's mostly beyond me. It would be a shame if anyone drew a negative conclusion about Scott without first reading what he wrote.

Scott Aaronson is a wonderful human being, and seeing the attacks against him, and how they have changed him, has been very painful.

He didn't say "being a nerdy straight male was harder than being a woman or gay" - he said that when he was a teenager he was so ashamed of his sexuality that he wished he were gay or a woman so that he wouldn't have what he perceived to be shameful sexual desire toward women. He was the rare self-loathing straight man, and people on the internet literally wanted to ruin his career or even kill him for admitting it. Imagine a white person who has so internalized the logic of white privilege that they are utterly ashamed of their race and wish they were black - it doesn't mean that person thinks black people have it easier than whites.

He said "being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes". http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

He said that the thought that it might be true would be completely alien to some people's way of seeing things. Which turned out to be proven true by the utterly unhinged way people reacted. It was like he had suggested that maybe the earth revolved around the sun.

Yes. The thought that hacker news might now be a haven for nazis masquerading as classical liberals defending free speech is probably quite horrifying to some people as well.

I get the sense that you're trolling, rather than engaging in good-faith discussion.

A good faith effort to see if you managed to refrain from reacting as though I had actually stated that as a fact rather than merely mentioning it as a thought. I was curious to see if you actually had such a strange understanding of the phrase that you didn't think he was advancing it as a position, or if you were simply arguing that it was a plausible interpretation of the phrase.

I know what you were doing, that's why I suggested that you were trolling - posting with dishonest motivation.

We react to the harshness before us most. But what we perceive personally is always an anecdote.

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