NYU Professor says he's locked out of X after declining to meet with Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

NYU Professor says he's locked out of X after declining to meet with Elon Musk

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I always question/imagine the integrity of the engineers there and how the conversion goes:

“Big boss: Hey engineer/employee, can you block this person from accessing his account?”

“Employee: Why?”

“Big boss: I’m butthurt”

“Employee: Sure”

At least in twisted ways, you will try to find a policy that got violated as an excuse.. if you can’t say no or refuse that no policy was violated, it’s time to leave that work environment, at least for your own personal integrity.

The people who can afford integrity have probably all departed, the ones left behind are either Musk-worshippers (oh yeah, a company full of that kind of ego, lovely) or are afraid of turning homeless, maybe with a bit of self-delusion so they can sleep at night despite their continued enablement of a giant manbaby.

Or they're effectively trapped there with their visa being based on their employers sponsorship

I imagine it was more like this:

Boss: “Block this account now.”

Employee: “Why?”

Boss: “Because if you don’t, you’re fired.”

Employee: “ok”

I think it is more like this:

Boss: “Block this account please.”

Employee: “ok”

“Give me a ban interface with unlimited access” is more like it.

Twitter 1.0 had all sorts of complex policies that ultimately boiled down to banning people the owners didn’t like. Twitter 2.0 has zero policies and just bans people the owner doesn’t like randomly

Twitter 1.0 was owned mostly by institutional shareholders, right? Don’t you think they were probably more concerned with shaping their audience to attract advertisers than they were concerned with getting buddy-buddy with NYU professors?

Not necessarily, institutional investors are playing with other people's money. Many of them are happy to accept lower returns in exchange if they get to their personal politics.

The NYU Professor in question is Scott Galloway, better known now for his podcasts, books and general media appearances than as a professor.

Name a professor that's known to the HN crowd that's not known because of their book, general media appearance or podcasts.

NYU professor Ken Perlin is best known for his software algorithm which won him an Oscar. Former MIT professor Tom Leighton is CEO of Akamai Technologies. Former UCSF professor Paul Ekman is known for his research of microfacial expressions as a signal of dishonesty; you may have seen the TV show Lie to Me which is loosely based on his work.

He's notable because he's always wrong about everything, to the point you can profit by investing the opposite of what he says.

https://galloway-index.webflow.io

He's doing it for the freedom of speech guys.

Being the people who have to implement all his knee-jerk ideas must be extremely frustrating.

https://archive.is/voE2s

Not a single comment about whether the claim is actually true or not? Just assuming the absolute worst / most damaging scenario? The propaganda machine is pumping hard isn't it.

The claim is that he cannot access his account. How would you confirm this, make him give you access to his email/2fa and let you reset his credentials?

It does state that he isn't showing up in search, which you could verify independently.

He could have posted a screenshot of the error message he gets or the communication with support. He hasn’t.

Every time you think Elon Musk couldn't be more of a cringey middle aged divorced guy, he does something like this.

> middle aged divorced guy

This has nothing to do with it.

Guess what, Scott Galloway is also a middle aged divorced guy.

Both of those things can be true.

Obviously this is a jab on my part, but banning someone because they won't meet you is bad form, especially if you claim to be a free speech absolutist.

> Both of those things can be true.

Both of what things? It is true, as I said, that both Musk and Galloway are middle aged divorced guys. Other than that, I'm not sure what you mean.

> banning someone because they won't meet you is bad form, especially if you claim to be a free speech absolutist.

Agreed, but I'm not sure why irrelevant demographic traits had to be brought into the discussion. Being middle aged and divorced didn't cause Musk to do what he does. It's unnecessary defamation of a large and varied group of people. It's essentially no different from ridiculing the physical appearance of someone you don't like.

Weird how you’re having this whole argument without regarding the one word (“cringey”) that was clearly the crux upon which OP’s entire assessment of certain personality traits was predicated.

How is that weird? "Cringey" means causing feelings of acute embarrassment or awkwardness, which seems apposite here. The point is that the OP could have said simply, "Every time you think Elon Musk couldn't be more cringey, he does something like this."

Sorry, Elon Musk is a very cool guy who does cool things constantly and he's in no way cringe. Hope this clears things up.

trolling?

the problem isn't that you shit on elon but that you suggested he's bad because he's middle-aged or divorced, especially when this "insult" applies to the other guy as well.

You could try making an (extremely tenuous) argument that getting divorce is weakly correlated with certain character traits, but is that really what you're trying to do?

> Hope this clears things up.

No, it hasn't. But this is clearly futile, so I'm done here.

Another way to see it is that if you criticize repeatedly somebody, and have being asked amicably to join him/her to talk about that, it would be polite at least to accept to hear his/her version of the history. Don't even need to join him, could simply have a email conversation

Musk claimed to be unfairly treated, and asking to be allowed to explain their own version of the facts in private is not unreasonable. The professor may discover that was missing some relevant facts, or find a different valuable perspective of the history. He could also address this critics directly to Musk and defend his opinion. Both are adults

And so let’s ban his account? No.

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