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Comment by jsomers | Hacker News Reader

I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for.

As a rule this is a pretty impoverished epistemic strategy.

Exactly. Shouldn't he be skeptical because he disagrees with some element of their advice? Shouldn't he be willing to engage with it, rather than dismissing it out of hand?

Oh, wait-- that's what he always does when he encounters someone who disagrees with him even in the slightest, even if it simply means referring to an operating system as merely "Linux".

He didn't dismiss the advice, but indicated he was skeptical of it. Pretty mild really.

As a rule I am skeptical of all advice, irrespective of how well aligned the provider may claim to be; but you can be certain I'm listening.

When your reply to criticism consists of only the statement that you are skeptical of that criticism, it is an implicit rejection of the criticism. I think almost any human would read it that way.

Yes, all he said was that he was skeptical. But if Stallman really is just commenting that he is skeptical, it is a poorly timed observation. I suspect you are wrong and that he means more than the literality of what he is saying.

It's obviously a rejection, but not obviously for the reason stated. From his point of view, he's just received a forward of an "open letter" that some blogger he's never heard of has already published seeking to gather attention at his expense. My guess is that he really wanted to write "Who are you? Go fuck yourself" but thought better of it, and this was really the only point he could score given how little he knows about the blogger.

It shouldn't matter what Stallman knows about the blogger. Either the argument itself is worth responding to, or it isn't.

In this case you can be certain Stallman is not listening. That's the interpretation that any native English speaker would and should take from that reply.

Sorry to do the pedantic-nerd thing, but why should he take the time and effort to "engage with it?"

I could imagine that after fighting for a cause for decades, the arguments and advice tend to repeat themselves. At some point it is not economical anymore to engage with every opponent.

I honestly feel like such a mentality is at odds with the overall philosophy of the open source software RMS loves to extol. Community engagement drives such products, and a big part of this sort of communication is disagreement.

It's not exactly "freedom" if we're only free to listen to RMS. His response reeks of self-righteousness; that alone should be enough to disqualify him as the voice of the FSF.

I was hoping for a thoughtful response, but he would have been better off not saying anything.

open source != free software

You make a number of very valid points. When a program is distributed without its source code, users don't have as much control as they would otherwise. Internet censorship is on the rise and presents a serious and credible threat to society.

open source != free software, but RMS was definitely talking about both

In general, I don't agree with Stallman's hyperbole and think that many of his beliefs are extreme.

However, in this case, I respect the fact that he chose to reply to the OP. Many arrogant people might prefer to ignore criticism. It appears that Stallman reviewed the OP's letter and took the time to reply to him (tersely, but honestly)

Stallman nearly always answers email sent to him, though he takes 24 hours or so to do it.

So you are not skeptical if someone who doesn't share your goals gives you advice on how to achieve those goals? I think that's healthy skepticism.

Exactly. In political circles that type of advice is referred to as concern trolling and is summarily dismissed.

> I think that's healthy skepticism.

Or a rationalized expression of confirmation bias.

In this case, the advice was from someone who does share the goals, and was offering advice on how to achieve those goals.

Someone who uses unfree software because it gives him an edge does not appear to share RMS' goals.

... and thus we see how the perfect is necessarily the enemy of the good then? Nonsense.

Two people can share a relative ranking of goodness for outcome states while differing on the methods to reach the better of such states.

I agree with that. It's not a black and white thing and it is sometimes very difficult to even tell goals and approaches apart because a particular approach to solve a larger problem can become an intermediate goal. Sometimes minor differences regarding the preferred approach become dogma. On the other hand, it's always possible to define goals broadly enough to find common ground with almost everybody but then it becomes meaningless. So I still think Stallman's skepticism is legitimate and doesn't necessarily mean he is ignoring other opinions. But I don't know him personally and I don't share his opinions on freedom.

For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values.

If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?

How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?

You're arguing against thinking.

This is absurd. We're not talking about measuring the rate of cellular mitosis in a lab, this is about how persuasive Stallman is as a speaker for his cause. You can follow him around to 50+ speaking engagements meticulously collecting metrics and come to the same conclusion you'd get listening to the buzz after a few of them and adhering to rules of thumb for public speaking developed over the past 5000 years, if you'd like. The difference is if everyone did it your way no one would ever get anything done (and they'd probably do it worse).

And let's not act as though this guy is in some camp that is opposite to Stallman's in the first place. They clearly share a lot of same values.

>How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?

Perhaps you should more clearly explain the link between the efficacy of a person's rhetorical strategies and their opinion on a given subject first.

I need to clarify:

* Evidence doesn't mean prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, given the sorts of arguments in other matters in the public sphere, and the numbers of adherents, I think you do not realize just what can succeed. 9/11 truthers, for instance.

* The rift between the free software and open source philosophies is well known, especially from RMS's own writings which is something that's especially relevant here. alexey's comments clearly put him in the latter camp.

* It is not disagreeing that makes their ideas unsupported. People who agree can also have unsupported ideas.

Same values? When Alexey wrote

> We live in a world where having the technological edge makes the difference between success and failure; asking us to just give up that edge for a theoretical idea of freedom is not going to work.

he embraced pure expedience and pretty much disclaimed having any values he'd go out of his way to uphold in this area.

Hm, that’s not how I read that sentence at all. It doesn’t sound like he is stating any values of his own in this sentence to me. Where do you see his values? I don’t see them.

Where do you see his values? I don’t see them.

I think that's the point.

Ok, so where do you see his absence of values? This reads to me like a value-neutral statement. We just don't know them and shouldn't make any claims about them.

I think Stallman would probably agree with the famous Howard Zinn quote: "You can't be neutral on a moving train."

I don't mean neutral in the sense of "having neutral values", I just mean that he does not explicitly express his values. We do not know his values.

> For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values.

Some of the advice that I remember most from the original post was about things that are tangential, at best, to FLOSS. Referring to the Kindle as the "Swindle" is related, but conspiracy theories about 9/11 and "Big Brother" almost certainly aren't.

> If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?

I think the main piece of evidence he offered was data on what his friends did: "Several friends of mine who had not heard of the FSF before left half way through because they were so put off by some of conspiratorial rhetoric above." While not an unbiased sample, it's about all you can expect from someone's after-action report on one talk that he went to.

Skepticism is never impoverishing.

This was rejection, not skepticism, despite what he called it.

Only RMS is in a position to say how much RMS actually considered the points raised.

I'm not as generous as you are in allowing that this just might be an issue of communication. As I understand it, he is a lawyer and also quite clever. I believe that he knew how it would be interpreted when he wrote it.

A rational skepticism is necessary for science to work at all. But radical skepticism is so impoverishing a philosophy that no one, except possibly a few nuts, believes it any longer. And there are several gradations in between.

There is a difference between skepticism and blind rejection. Distinguishing between the two in yourself, I have found, can be difficult because it requires significant and constant introspection.

(Sticks fingers in ears).

My six year old son does that.

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