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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

I just read this article about a Stephen Hawking biography that talks about how "Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability" so identity perception by the public does in fact contribute to how people think about their achievements.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/07/hawking-by-gra...

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Sergey Brin (of Google fame) was known for "dating" young interns/employees at Google in the early days. Once, when HR reminded him that he could get into trouble (since it was against policy), his response was, basically (paraphrasing) along the lines of "Why am I hiring them then?"

Basically, he considered it is his right to have his way with his young interns and employees.

I don't necessarily doubt that this happened, but it's worth pointing out that this anecdote is from Adam Fisher's 2018 report of what Charlie Ayers recounted that HR told him Brin said, twenty years after the fact. Maybe it happened that way, maybe not.

Uh, let me tell you that that behavior is ignored in high profile scientists regardless of disability.

It is only in the last couple years that outright sexual abuse of employees and trainees has become something that could discredit a high profile scientist, and even those people are getting plenty of support in finding new places to do research thanks to the Epstein class.

Hawking was long dead before that, and many high profile scientists are guilty of what Hawking is guilty of.

Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy.

That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it could just be a general instance of people being assholes.

This reminds me a sexual harassment training class I had to take at a startup decades ago. [They actually called it that too, like they were training us how to sexually harass!] We learned about something called the equal opportunity jerk defense. If you could prove you were an asshole to everyone, then you weren't guilty of sexual harrassment.

I am reading a comment (1) by a person (2) who read an article on a newspaper website (3) discussing a book (4) written by someone about the life (5) of Stephen Hawking.

What I read !== Stephen Hawking.

By that logic don't read anything at all.

? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.

They specifically said

> What I read !== Stephen Hawking.

And by that logic one cannot know anything or anyone by merely reading about them, which I find to be absurd, hence my comment.

Words will never be a human, for what it's worth. May as well delete that code path, as it'll never be reached.

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