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Comment by lovasoa | Hacker News Reader

The original article presents her in a very bright light, as a smart and brave woman who is engaged in a legal battle against large greedy corporations. And I find the photo quite cool.

I think she is just overly susceptible, and maybe a little bit paranoid (which is understandable for a person with enemies as powerful as hers).

This reminds me of the time when a russian entomologist named a new wasp species he discovered after her in her honor, and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for a few days in retaliation !

edit: sci-hub was blocked only a few days, not months, my memory failed me.

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I'm not sure about the entomologist issue but for this article, I feel that some of the issue might be language barrier and cultural misunderstanding.

For example, she mentions this paragraph: > She said that while she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains pretty much a one-woman show (it’s “mainly me,” she said) The Chronicle of Higher Education

And criticises it by saying: > So they lie to their readers that Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’ , and to support this, they seize upon a word ‘mainly’ that I have used to describe my work, as a proof that I am not doing this myself, but getting helped instead.

The use of show in this context is normal and typical language usage, but she instead tries to ascribe the literal meaning to the word 'show' and is offended by it. No native English speaker would interpret "one-woman show" as meaning "Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’ ".

So combine a thin skin due to numerous attack, a good command of English but no mastery of the subtleties of certain words and expressions and you have a recipe for her to seem overly susceptible.

I recall reading about an incident where a journalist with access to North Korea was detained for a while over a phrase that said a guard "barked" orders, as the locals deemed a comparison to a dog rather unflattering.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36200530

Maybe the connotations that you are used to subconsciously ignoring are actually still there after all.

btw, if I find a new species of donkey, I will name it after you.

and in turn, if I find a new species of invisible pink unicorn, the honor shall be thine.

that is to say, neither of us will do either of these things; what are you even talking about?

You are so generous. If I discover a pink unicorn, I'm totally naming it after myself.

I was surprised reading the Chronicle article after her own post. If it hadn't been from the archive.org link I would have been certain they went back and added "Elbakyan, who is originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and coded Sci-Hub herself." after she complained but nope, there all the time.

Also "Pirate Queen"? "beloved outlaw"? They couldn't have made her sound cooler if they tried.

I think she is trying hard to be respectable, i don't think she is trying to be just cool.

The author of Sci-Hub doesn't need to try hard to be respectable.

Which does not imply that she is not trying.

> "Pirate Queen"? "beloved outlaw"?

Cool titles, but I can see why she might not want to be lumped in with the general file sharing community. I don't think open access science should be in the same category as pirating Hollywood movies and cracking videogames.

I don't think pirating video games and Hollywood movies deserve a separate category from "replicating information" to be fair, but facilitated information asymmetry is the quintessemce of most businesses... So ... Yeah. To each their own.

It is getting a bit embarrassing. Wished she disregarded things about her person. All kind of stuff is going to be said and written about you when your a globally known person. Better, and healthier, to focus on defending the cause and not yourself.

Way easier said than done. Especially for someone that maybe wasn't searching to be fully in the spotlight or that is not used to it.

> All kind of stuff is going to be said and written about you when your a globally known person.

There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison or kill her. It's weird to call a revolutionary who is in the spotlight paranoid. A couple of administration changes and a sex or bribery scandal in some place she's never even visited could set off a series of events where she ends up like Assange or worse.

> There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison or kill her.

Imprison? Sure. I’ll even grant you "financially ruined" from lawsuits, but who wants her dead?

It may be my personal bias, but I'd imagine anyone whose role makes her their enemy would lack the moral fibre to care about the distinction.

That is already in the works. Sweden has a woman who have already made false statements that she has withdrawn but they are using the rape charges to get her to the US.

Yeah but it feels is neither weird to be called or be paranoid in that situation. Some things that Assange has said definitely comes off as paranoid and perhaps completely off but he also has had more reasons than almost anyone to be paranoid.

When you have powerful enemies and know it you're probably not better at recognizing where they are lurking about than anyone else. So you end up lashing out at shadows. Who can blame you.

> There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison or kill her.

Kill her? What evidence is there of that?

> blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation !

It's been blocked for four days. (5th to 9th of September 2017). This is indeed an overreaction, no need to inflate the figures.

Ooops, you are right, I should have checked ! I updated my comment.

Yeah, she's doing God's work and sci-hub is amazing but Elbakyan is an odd person who gets extremely paranoid and defensive, holds weird beliefs and often does things that are over the top.

It might not be possible to run a site like sci hub without being extremely paranoid all the time.

Being attacked leads to paranoid-like behavior. Your Bayesian filters go all wonky when you know they're actually out to get you.

It pollutes everything in your life; you need to be suspicious of everyone and everything.

The other thing about a constant series of attacks -- without support to field them -- is that you DO misidentify things, and sometimes respond imperfectly. There are 24 hours in a day. Sometimes you'll miss something, and other times, you'll overreact, or just react inappropriately.

Talk to anyone with a stalker.

Now imagine that stalker has a billion dollar war chest, and can hire a PI to trail you on a whim, corrupt government officials, or wield more-or-less infinite resources compared to you.

In terms of weird beliefs, we all got 'em. The difference is mostly with regards to whether others find out about them.

I haven't been in the same position as Elbakyan, but I've been in a sufficiently analogous one that I don't see what she's doing as anything other than human.

Honestly, I'm very close to sending her a few btc. Although my employer would hate me for using it, sci hub is just an absolutely brilliant, internationally known godsend.

One of the things that publishers have started doing of late is just linking the "pdf" button to things that are not pdfs. I have legal access to basically every journal article I could ever want, but sci-hub provides a much better product: you actually just get the pdf with one button, and no telemetry crap either.

There's even an awesome grease/tampermonkey script to provide (small, inobtrusive) inline links to sci-hub here: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button.

She really is a saint. I hope we realise that....

Spot on! Thank you for that. Some work I do would be sunk without her and we know there are countless independent researchers who could say the same thing.

“Paranoia strikes deep:

Into your life it will creep.

It starts when you’re always afraid.

You step out of line, the man come and take you away. ”

For What It's Worth, Buffalo Springfield, 1967

>and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation

Sounds like shes the wrong person in charge of sci-hub. Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended is probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators no?

And Russia is probably her only protection not being assange'd already.

Feel free to run your own Sci-Hub, then. It's not like this is a massively collaborative project that she's the executive decision-maker of; it's largely just her.

Don't you see a problem here?

>>Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended

>it's largely just her

Yeah and that's the problem, with all dictatorships.

>It's not like this is a massively collaborative project

Who then uploads the content? Her alone?

She's the one delivering that access. And if you want to define sole decisionmaking power as dictatorship, I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday, too. You're free to provide access to the papers yourself.

>I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday

Your cookies are not important for the scientific world, and she is NOT the baker of the Scientific papers, just a publisher, and since it's not her content she has even less rights to block a country from partially self made work.

Don't you see the irony in it?

>...to remove all barriers in the way of science (but don't name insects after me)

If she's just a publisher, feel free to publish it yourself.

I think you're side-stepping the point: It is valid to point out her self-contradiction of her ideals.

I can even understand her anger: she's been harassed with lawsuits in multiple countries and companies have probably had her personally investigated in those efforts. Paranoia isn't really even the appropriate word in that case.

But it's still an extreme overreaction and contradiction of her ideals to block an entire country over one person's insult.

Imagine your stated mission was to provide cookies for everyone in town because the local cookie factory charged $100 each. Then one kid said they didn't like the cookie, so you banned all kids from eating them.

You'd be within your rights, sure. But you would also be a going back and violating your own ideals.

So, sure, it's her site, her rules, but I think it's fair to expect someone to uphold their principals and be disappointed when they don't.

> Who then uploads the content? Her alone?

Not lately, but usually she does a fair share of it. And she's the sole curator.

Yeah...when Fan's overlook the downsides.

Why do you block access (for a whole country) when someone gave your name to a wasp?

A lot of the benefit of a site like this is moot if entire countries are banned for petty reasons. Imagine if the US was blocked because she didn't like the former president.

And, quite honestly, speaking about rights in the context of what amounts to a piracy site is kinda ironic.

It was less than a week, and I don't think it's happened more than once. If you just consider uptime, Sci-Hub is doing pretty well.

She’s not a native English speaker, fine. That doesn’t seem like a disqualifier to me.

I wrote that:

>Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended is probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators no?

What has that todo with language? Is Wikipedia blocking you (or your country) from access because you called an insect after Jimmy Wales?

I agree that it was petty of her but unless if anybody else steps up in her place in a substantial way and fight the major publishers, I think we should be a little lenient on her idiosyncracities. I don't know what the real story behind the block is but something tells me there was a lot of other baggage on her mind prior to hearing about the wasp.

Look, i think she makes a great job. But i hate it when those fanboys cannot see the irony of what she did...i would be proud like hell if a scientist would name a slug after me.

I do not disagree here. That being said, I fucking hate wasps so while I wouldn't hold a grudge over it, I'd definitely have mixed feelings about having a wasp named after me myself.

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