Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Your perceptions of one-sidedness are coming from the force of your passions. I assure you that people on the opposite side of this story say exactly the same things, just with one bit flipped.

I addressed all of this in depth at the time (ironically, in a submission of the same URL that you posted, which wasn't killed):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26714003

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713701

That took hours, and I don't have hours to write anything new. If, after reading those comments, you still think there's something I haven't addressed, please double-check to make double-sure that I didn't address it. If it passes that test, ask me then and I'll try to answer. In the meantime, though, please don't post new variations in this endless sequence.

View on HN

> force of your passions

Someone was falsely accused of being misogynist ("Stallman never made me feel uncomfortable." - Molly De Blanc, leader of the anti-RMS letter.), transphobic ("My pronouns were always respected by Stallman and the rest of the GNU Project the day my transition was announced, and the same for other trans developers."), and more. I am outraged that HN failed to prevent– or even show balance– in the spread of this misinformation.

> I assure you that people on the opposite side of this story say exactly the same things, just with one bit flipped.

They are practicing ritual defamation, which mandates any speech presenting evidence is taboo: https://stallmansupport.org/the-practice-of-ritual-defamatio...

> If, after reading those comments, you still think there's something I haven't addressed, please double-check to make double-sure that I didn't address it. If it passes that test, ask me then and I'll try to answer.

Fine.

I didn't count, but the story stream that I saw seemed roughly balanced between pro and anti RMS. There certainly wasn't a strong skew.

Your feeling that it was unbalanced is another example of the bias I'm talking about. Both sides over-weight the datapoints they dislike and under-weight (or simply don't notice) the ones they approve of, so both sides end up with a feeling of unjust imbalance. This is what I mean by false feelings of generality.

I did an unweighted, unfiltered count of the submissions with more than 10 comments in your post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636

16 negative

8 positive

In the examples of popular threads you cited, a two-thirds supermajority were anit-Stallman.

I did a cursory search for "RMS" and "Stallman" in the past month, since your link was posted. I found 3 pro-Stallman articles (and no anti-Stallman ones):

https://meribold.org/2021/04/07/critique-of-rms-open-letter/ https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-... https://stallman.org/articles/dr-stallman.html

That brings our total to 16 negative and 11 positive, or 1.5 anti-Stallman articles per pro-Stallman articles. (60% anti-Stallman.)

Weighted by the number of comments, there are 378 more comments on the links you provided.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com