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Comment by _pfxa | Hacker News Reader

So I went over and looked around this Felleisen person's personal website, and... how do I put this, he is one unpleasant insufferable dude. Enter the rabbit hole: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/

> → personal site

> Warning You are about to leave campus and visit a web site

> with centrist views that may offend readers used to safe spaces.

I followed the link, and felt too much cringe to be able detect offense per se.

Personally I am avoiding Racket so long as this man is anywhere near it. Luckily I didn't invest any significant time in it before. I feel deeply sorry for his grad students and underlings, despite knowing none. It must've been an ordeal for each and every one of them.

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The link to the personal site was a byproduct of what he described as a "social experiment" in which he published the James Damore memo on his office door, and was offended that students reported him to the dean for acting to create a hostile work environment, rather than engage with him directly about the scientific merits of Damore's memo.

He describes this himself here: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Free_Speech.html

Seems like a strange course of action. What if someone just wants to come and see you and not debate the scientific merits of Damore's memo? The man is a computer science professor, after all. I don't know about "hostile work environment" but it seems needlessly antagonistic to me.

needlessly antagonistic is a fair characterization of his approach to the world at large

It is not needless. It is self serving. It expresses his privilege and power in the explicit environment where they matter most. It amplifies them.

> What if someone just wants to come and see you and not debate the scientific merits of Damore's memo?

How about ignore it and not report it to the dean?

The observations made in Damore's memo are rather anodyne (and essentially correct). The folks making a scene about it are contributing to a hostile environment.

In what world is posting the memo on your office door not “making a scene about it”?

The asymmetry here is really quite simple. On the one hand, you have an academic sharing a set of views that, while intellectually unfashionable, are well within the scientific mainstream. On the other hand you have people trying to get him fired, rather than ignore him or politely try to change his mind.

Did he expect the kind of response he received? Sure, though I think hoped for better. But that's not making a scene. That's just not being completely acquiescent to unreasonable people.

An academic sharing a set of views that are unrelated to the subject matter he teaches, posted on part of his teaching environment.

Make it sound like a noble stand all you want but he was being needlessly provocative in an attempt to get the exact reaction he got and stir up controversy. It’s deeply tiresome.

If a left leaning English professor put up a lengthy memo on racial justice it would be dismissed by many as virtue signalling, as a distraction from their teaching, as a sign of an oppressive environment, etc etc. Yet when this is done by someone on the right the exact same people consider it the pursuit of some grand noble cause. Give me a break.

Nobody tried to get him fired. They wanted him to not post inane and sexist bullshit on his office door.

If you want scientific debate, you seek studies and seek people who study same area.

Manifest on doors (no matter what manifest) to me sound like a statement of conviction and thus pointless to debate. Partly as dont feed the trolls and partly that it is unreasonable to expect such person to listen.

1) It's not a manifesto.

2) Damore's memo does cite scientific research

3) at least some experts in the fields of psychometrics and sex differences believed the memo to be substantively correct

4) Trying to get someone fired for holding beliefs that are well within the scientific mainstream is the antithesis of a good academic environment.

So he was offended and needed a safe space for his logorrhoea, I see...

I did read the entire website (didn't mean to, it was an accident, one that I resent). The guy's basically full of himself and bordering on alt-right if not just that.

If you hover his photo on his homepage, it has a quote from a climate change denier. The whole thing is like a red flag wholesaler shop.

My litmus test is climate change denial - for some reason truly insufferable people consistently have this one thing in common.

Sure enough among the quotes is an excerpt form a 1974 Time magazine article about global cooling, which is a dog whistle for "the science is not settled".

My sister had to suffer through a few courses with a professor who gave such enlightened opinions as "men should be paid more, because they eat more than women".

Fortunately the students managed to make him lose his position as a lecturer on the grounds that he ranted instead of actually giving the lecture.

The link on centrist views wasn't that bad although the other link leads to a site without HTTPS. Bad stuff indeed.

I wouldn't read too much into people's personal sites tbh. People are multifaceted. BTW the site does seem a bit unnecessarily political, but this is far from rare these days.

he seems to have many faces, most of them suck tho.

"Unnecessarily political" is a nice abbreviation of "his politics are hurtful, hateful, and part objectively wrong".

nope I didn't mean that at all

I'd say the same about Stallman's page for instance, or Torvalds', and their politics are drastically different

entering in value judgments on the specific politics is a fool's errand - I think he's doing good work, and thus the politics are counterproductive as they take nearly all the attention away from their work

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