Comment by zalequin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zalequin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the cult of personality around Aaron. It’s like a self insert for people that fantasize about sticking it to the man or something; the tragic hero, the genius boy who died not realizing his potential, the man who dared to defy the authorities. Yawn.

Fact is Aaron was an angsty teen with an axe to grind with the authorities . Reading Chomsky certainly didn’t help. Acting out childishly by spreading copy righted material, getting caught and whining about how all of this is so unfair…

Look, he was no genius. Genius does not invent reddit; it invents facebook and then proceeds to take over the world because actual, real, genius understands the rules of the game.

Aaron was smart enough to understand just how fucked things are but oh so very dumb to act out on his aggressive impulses. The very same impulses that later lead him to kill himself.

Ironically his suicide accomplished far more than his technical know how could ever hope to achieve.

p.s. aaron was no hero. You dont ever want to be him and you certainly dont want your children to be him. His ideals were pure and correct, but he could not accept we’re living in a world filled with trash humans. Should’ve played the game correctly imho.

Cult of personality? Are we living on the same planet? As far as I know people talk about him a couple of time a year. No statue, no memorial.

Yeah people erase his flaws a bit, yes it's a bit annoying, but he actually tried to do something positive in his life instead of trying to get rich at any costs like that "genius" of Zuckerberg (genius for what?).

So people remember him, I doubt most people will care when Zuckerberg will die, he just didn't do anything to deserve it, your money doesn't make you a good person.

Zuckerberg will be remembered in the annals of history. Swartz won't even be in a footnote.

One of the things about having ridiculous amounts of wealth is that it affords you to make a ridiculous number of bets. You only have to hit on a few to be remembered as a genius.

Just ask Tommy Edison.

Not sure whether this is your intention, but your comment comes across as lacking some empathy. Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be under such pressure. Please do not make light of the complex motives that drive people to suicide.

(and if someone is reading this who is mentally in a bad place right now, please seek out some help: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)

> Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison.

That's a common misconception, largely due to the ridiculous way the DoJ writes its press releases.

Each Federal crime carries a range of possible prison time. What you actually get depends on a large number of factors, such as how much damage you caused, whether or not your crime was a drug crime, past criminal history, and many others.

When the DoJ writes press releases they just add up for each charge the maximum that it is theoretically possible for someone to get from the crime if they hit all the factors that push for longer sentences and none of the factors that push for shorter sentences.

So when they arrest you for crime X and write their press release, they don't actually tell what you, the first time offender who committed a mild instance of the crime with no aggravating factors and several mitigating factors is facing. No. They tell what the Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler of whatever activity you were doing would face for crime X.

It is even worse, because they actually even exaggerate what Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler would actually face, too! If a person is charged with multiple crimes from the same underlying act, say crimes X, Y, and Z, and is convicted of all of them the crimes are grouped together into one for sentencing, with the sentence for the group being the sentence you would have received for whichever for X, Y, or Z you would have gotten the longest sentence for if that was the only one you were convicted on.

Here's a good article on this in general: "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS." [1]

Here's a couple articles specifically on the Swartz charging.

This one covers the charges themselves: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)" [2]

This one covers the prosecution, including a look at probably sentencing: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion)" [3]

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...

We get that the justice system threatens people larger penalties to see what charges they can get to stick, but they also use it to force a plea bargain. In Aaron's case, the prosecutors were adamant that Aaron should get at least 6 months of prison, and would not offer any plea bargain that did not include this half a year of jail time (Ortiz wanted to make an example out of him). The fact that the prosecution was seeking jail time at all is utterly insane. This is why Aaron chose to fight.

Aaron didn’t choose to fight. He chose to kill himself. Which turned him into an unreasonably glorified martyr whose case people still talk about to (and on) this day.

Why do you think he and his causes are unreasonably glorified?

You couldn't be more wrong. The plea bargain was offered early in the case, Aaron thought he could fight it, but the case went on too long, and he ran out of money to fight it. Only after he had absolutely nothing left for the fight did he take his own life.

Thanks for the clarification; these are the comments I go to HN for.

My recollection/understanding is that the authorities/court system locked up his bank account, he was legally not allowed to say that while trying to crowd source funds to help pay his attorney and cope in the midst of the case so people jumped to the wrong conclusion and lambasted him rather than support him and his suicide followed shortly on the heels of that (like within a day or two, iirc).

He was painted into a corner with seemingly no way out.

People who are suicidal frequently have intractable problems and are frequently treated like they are merely crazy. The best way to help people who are suicidal is to not be dismissive of their very real problems and, of possible, actually be helpful. But as a baseline, don't act like it's all in their head. That actively makes it harder to solve intractable personal problems.

Wow this is some harsh criticism.

I'd be curious to know why he deserves to be attacked for his technical know-how. Also I am curious to know why you think committing a crime out of conviction is inherently immoral. If we equate laws with morals we will never improve our ethical understanding of the world.

It is exactly the people willing to commit crime with the goal of improving our moral compass that should be celebrated as heroes.

If we would all "play ball" then we would be stuck without voting rights in a feudal system of kings and peasants.

Finally, if genius invents Facebook let's pray we ran out of geniuses.

Maybe not a genius, but definitely a hero.

Following your logic, then the real heroes are actually the cowards?

A hero in the same sense that Che Guevara or even Pablo Escobar are considered heroes by some people.

So a hero in the dictionary sense of the word? In the sense of the commonly agreed upon definition?

The fact that you don't agree with a person's cause does not preclude them from being heroic. Pablo Escobar was a drug kingpin, but Che Guevera at least thought he was fighting for his people.

I don't like how people downvoted this comment without even saying why.

The wording may be harsh (not what I think, just attempting to guess) but I believe there is truth in it; although the idea of allowing free access to academic journals is laudable, the way he went about it was naive/wrong in my opinion and impulsive as you say.

Comment is flagged now. Bizarre.

Because it's disrespectful, and dismissive of the effort Aaron made to make our world a better place. It's also overly pessimistic, sure there's trash people on the planet and they're often in positions of power. But they are not a majority and it is possible to genuinely affect change through activism and drawing attention to causes, no how matter how childish or petty the activism might seem.

Finally and most importantly on this site specifically it should be down voted because it is flagrantly anti intellectual to resign to the status quo and to tell people to not be disruptive and to basically "play the game" and go work for Facebook or whatever.

What's a person who has those views even doing on this site? Just go outside and play golf with the governor of Missouri or whatever.

I don't know which way the OP intended the "play the game" sentence, but I didn't take it to mean go work for Facebook or whatever; instead I took it as don't be naive in thinking you can fight against injustices in the system like so, because it will land you in prison (or worse); instead maybe find alternative ways that let you accomplish the same end goal, even if you have to accept progress cannot be achieved as quickly as the direct unsafe approach.

Do you have better suggestions how to allow such access? As far as I know, Sci-Hub is the current leader in this field, with methods not that different from Aaron's. The official methods to achieve this proceed at snail's pace and one doubts if they would move anywhere without the pressure caused by the activism.

No I don't have any suggestions myself but as you point out there are already other alternatives, and I believe none are as blatantly obvious as when Aaron downloaded hundreds of documents per minute:

SciHub itself may be similar but there are some important differences, e.g., the creator is not a citizen or resident of the US where this would be prosecuted (I think she lives in Russia, which only "recently" ruled to block the site, but I'm unsure she'd face any criminal charges) and the way they source the paywalled articles/journals is less easy for the authorities to circumvent.

In addition, (some) universities and other institutions are slowly moving towards open access journals and other measures; not at an ideal pace, I agree, but certainly done on a better foundation to ensure publishers don't just bury people with lawsuits and so on.

I agree with you that the SciHub's difference to Aaron is the different legal environment. But I think this is not a good explanation why SciHub might be morally better. Indeed protesting unjust laws could be considered moral good, whereas operating from Russia is merely a legal hack, if useful one.

The open access movement is precisely what I meant with the snail pace activity. I'm doubtful it would happen in even present degree without the activism.

Agree completely. By all accounts he was a bright guy, bu he did something very foolish. He did a crime and rather than play ball he martyred himself. Yes there probably was prosecutorial overreach and yes our criminal justice system could use reform. But this guy was no saint in the matter and could have easily got off with a minor sentence.

So you think Rosa Parks was also a criminal for having the foolishness to refuse to give up her seat for a white?

Breaking immoral laws is a sign of being a hero, not a criminal. Unfortunately the monied interests were more powerful than a brilliant kid, so we have to live in a world without Aaron Swartz but with rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.

You’re seriously comparing Aaron Swartz to Rosa Parks?

Mental illness needs to be destigmatized, and access to treatment is imperative. Aaron’s death was a tragedy, and the government was engaged in serious prosecutorial overreach.

But, Rosa Parks? Seriously now? Aaron was engaged in a puerile “hack” that spun out of control when the school and feds got involved.

The hagiography around this poor guy is nauseating sometimes.

Rosa Parks was involved with stubbornly giving up her seat in the front of the colored section for a white woman, which "spun out of control when the feds got involved" but like Swartz she pushed her way through the Justice system to challenge unfair laws. Segregation was obviously more disgusting, but I don't like the idea that activists of the past are incomparable saintlike figures, especially when they were extremely contentious for their time. I'm sure plenty of people said that Parks was being "puerile" at the time and should have just given up her seat instead of making it an issue, but sometimes making something an issue is the only way to create an opportunity for progress.

> rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.

You know who’s to blame for scientific publishing? Fucking academia. The web was built to allow research papers to be shared. Seriously - it’s fucking purpose built for that very task.

There are no resources involved in scientific publishing besides the time of the authors and reviewers, none of whom are employed by the publishers.

So why do we have any academic publishers at all, over 30 years after the web was invented? Surely we could have solved the problems with organizing peer review, etc by now. The answer is: academia wants it to be this way. Researchers want to publish in prestige journals. The cred from prestige journals is integral to the academic career path in enough disciplines that the system is allowed to self perpetuate.

The cred isn’t to stroke a researcher’s ego, it’s because the alternative is to not get to do any research. Or to not have access to research institutes. Or to not eat. Privileged researchers in areas that aren’t as affected by this problem (eg. compsci) can afford to publish on Arxiv, but others aren’t so fortunate.

Publish(-in-prestiguous-journals)-or-perish is real, and the for-profit journal system is a parasite profiting from it. Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research - but good luck speaking out against that.

> Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research

This is an unsupported declarative statement, and I view the evidence as pointing in the opposite direction. For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.

A good portion of the economics has nothing whatsoever to do with private enterprise, and instead involves academic career paths and grant applications, often to non-profit or government grantors.

Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access. Would that change the fundamental economics in a meaningful way? The money to pay researchers is not coming from publishers.

> For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.

They are filling a need they created and maintain themselves. Publishers with extremely deep pockets bought out prestigious non-profit journals [1], turning an inelastic market (originating from the value of peer-reviewed journals in a pre-Internet era) into an oligopoly that continued to raise prices as much as possible. No extra need was filled by the takeover, no value was provided, only more profit was extracted because it was economically possible. Now, this profit is used to fund the continued existence of this need, by lobbying against any effort to remove this need. It makes perfect sense economically, but is plainly detrimental to society and is at a stage that makes any gradual change very difficult.

> Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access.

This sort of thought experiment is meaningless as any kind of proof because it doesn't consider the complexity of the human element. Academic researchers aren't perfectly rational units independent from any other system, like the simple fact of having to pay rent to live and that rent being available from this month's paycheck, and that paycheck being dependent on continued employment whose loss would likely take months to resolve. You're only demonstrating that if we lived in some abstract, perfect world, some problems would solve themselves. But in that same abstract, perfect world that problem likely wouldn't even manifest in the first place. So what are you really proving?

[1] - https://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing....

What is the alternative to prestigious journals? Each scientist should read all of the papers published in their field every day?

The work of curating a journal for various metrics (subject matter, standards of peer review, impact etc.) is crucial to the everyday working of science. This doesn't mean that a few for profit corporations should get to extract profit from it, but it also doesn't mean that academia should give up the whole idea and just read all of scihub or arxiv to make up their own minds.

They still have the currency of being established journals. That is waning these days but I think it will take a long time.

Politics also has an interest in protecting such established venues the same way as it works for the press.

Rosa Parks committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Rosa Parks is considered a hero because she stood up against an unjust law KNOWING that she was going to be prosecuted for her actions.

Aaron Swartz committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Swartz believed that his internet status and his MIT association would shield him from the consequences of his action, and he killed himself when he realized he was going to be treated like a nobody and subjected to the same sorts of prosecutorial pressure that affects thousands of Americans every day.

He was no hero, and it's frankly ridiculous and demeaning to the memory of Rosa Parks and what she went through to use her life story to prop him up. The US Civil Rights movement is one where people took actions that they KNEW were illegal partly because they knew how bad the optics would be. Famous Civl Rights leaders used the after-release press conferences as pulpits to preach their sermons of racial equality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com