Comment by yocheckitdawg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yocheckitdawg | Hacker News Reader

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The argument isn't that enabling weird dudes to inappropriately hit on women is the progress we are after, that is a complete misunderstanding of the point.

The argument is that often renegade and maverick thinkers are deeply deeply flawed on an individual level and would do stuff like that. This doesn't really fit well into the "progress category" of civil rights, it's more about advances in technology.

TBH I don't know jack about Richard Stallman, but my understanding is he played a huge role in developing the idea of free software which has had enormous benefit to the world in general.

The question is does the benefit the ideas and works of Richard Stallman have brought warrant the personal costs he has imposed on many people around him? And in the future, are the potential personal costs another Richard Stallman would bring worth the advances they could bring in another area?

To put it even more bluntly, will it be possible to have the types of significant progress we desire in technology or what area, while excluding people who on a more personal level we find deeply problematic? Can the best parts of a Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs be separated from the worst parts? Can we in a sense "sanitise" progress so that only people we find socially acceptable are the ones who will do it? What if the people who will do most for humanity's collective properity are (a) assholes (b) unprofessional, and (c) never the shut the hell up about stuff they know nothing about?

I don't have an answer here, but it is going to be an issue worth thinking about going into the future.

I'm not sure that the entire careers of a Stallman or a Jobs are inseparable from them acting like dickheads at some point in their career.

It may be the case that having "Future Stallman" or "Future Jobs" be persuaded to rein in their excesses (rather than being tolerated and encouraged to be raging assholes, at least in some contexts and ways) might be of benefit both to the people around them, but also, the talented individuals themselves.

Maybe we can apply discussions of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" also to badly behaved white middle class people too, and they could do better?

There's no future Jobs or Stallman who is going to change the status quo of technology, but be agreeable and not neurotic.

First of all, this is bullshit. There are plenty of perfectly agreeable people in computing who have had massive impact. I've met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, for example, and both were kind and pleasant people. I don't recall hearing that Berners-Lee is anything but pleasant. While there are plenty of disagreeable sorts (I hear Dijkstra was a bit of a Djick) there is by no means a hard and fast rule that those who change the status quo of technology are dickheads. And some of the people who were neurotic aren't necessarily bad to other people, and historically, it's easy to point to some people who might have had much saner lives but for the times they lived in (Alan Turing).

Second, even the people like Jobs and Stallman can moderate their toxic behavior towards other people if incentives are in place. That doesn't mean that they will be normal. They will almost certainly continue to be rude, abrupt, and a little weird. They don't have to be nice.

There's something bizarrely fetishistic about the assumption that letting people like Jobs and Stallman do whatever they want is essential to their success. It's like Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength.

Few differences here though.

Thompson and Ritchie were technical pioneers but weren't philosophical pioneers. Their work was entirely about implementing technical solutions, it had nothing to do with the philosophical structure within which those solutions were made.

Jobs and Stallman were different. They had strong and assertive views about how technology "should" be, not just how things would get done.

Jobs was all about accessible, easy to use, and sexy being important to technology.

Stallman is all about resisting the influence on corporate and governmental interests on the development of software.

I mean look at this list of suggestions Stallman made to Microsoft. https://mspoweruser.com/richard-stallmans-10-suggestions-to-... This is entirely about the philosophy of how computer software development should occur, not really anything to do with the technical aspects of it.

Richard Stallman sounds like a bit of a paranoid nutter. Is it safe to assume that his paranoia and personal idiosyncrasies can be separated from his philosophical views of the world (many of which are fundamentally about empowering the individual technology user against corporate and governmental interests which many of us agree with)? The jury is out on that one imo. He has seeded his ideas successfully and now they permeate the culture so perhaps he as an individual is no longer necessary to the movement.

But what about the next Stallman? A man or woman with a vision of how the world should or could be that is informed by their personal flaws? Will they be determined as to problematic to be involved in the industry and we will lose out on a unique way of looking at the world that would leave as all better off? I don't know. None of us do. It's an open question.

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