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Comment by dylangs1030 | Hacker News Reader

Genius or not, is he a misanthrope? Yes, he has a splendid list of cool things he's done, and he's a luminary.

But why compile a list of things that basically says, "I generally don't like people, the things most people do or have, or the silly rituals most people enjoy."

I can respect his opinions, but he comes across as very condescending...

That said, I do admire how much of a diehard he is about his beliefs. Not many people actually "walk the walk" when it comes to not owning a cell phone in today's age...

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I assume you haven't read many biographies of famous people. The only thing that strikes me as uncommon is that RMS writes it on a website in condensed form rather than having it written by a biographer for a physical book. Many historical famous people had extreme opinions, and was very dismissal of "silly rituals", newspapers, cats, workers, and street music to name a few.

I try reading this while assuming the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he's doing it on purpose (it feels like he isn't even aware that he's doing it). It makes the entire thing easier to read.

This kind of thinking did happen to me when I tried to generate a consistent world view.

At this point, there are just too many contradictions, I'd rather forget and simply accept the absurd.

For example, being an atheist, I don't particularly believe in holidays myself. I do enjoy myself with my family even if it mean a few capitalists make a little more money during the season. On the whole, a meaningless event makes the whole world happy.

I'm of a fairly open religion (Hinduism). So, there aren't ardent rules you need to waste time with.

I don't see the absurdity. You like having holidays because you find them fun. You're happy to go along with religious and/or relentlessly capitalistic holidays for the sake of expediency, because (as mentioned in the previous sentence) holidays are fun for you. There's not a single part of this that doesn't make sense.

I was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism#cite_ref-6

Sorry, I am confused. You say you are atheist, and of a "fairly open religion". You probably mean that you grew up in that culture, right? Because, in my book, the set of atheists and the set of religious people (whatever the religion) have the empty set as intersection.

I'm not a religious person. Hinduism is supposedly not religion but a "way of life"[1]. I really don't want to get into to the specificity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism#cite_ref-Klostermaier_... [1]

If you assume it's a religion, try this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism (Ctrl/Cmd + F. "atheist")

By open I mean there is no rigid rule set or algorithm in my culture to obtain salvation or anything like that (going to temple is optional). You could simply say no. My parents didn't bother me after a while (My mum is an orthodox person). I do want to point out that being a "nasthik" (non-believer) is not encouraged, but ignored.

Off-topic note, by this token, Buddhism is even more in favor of atheism (at least more accepting, and several denominations are almost that without saying the word). It's a religion born out of Hinduism that tries to eliminate almost everything except acceptance, peace and meditation (that's an oversimplification, but it's rather accurate).

Err.. No. Buddhism is just a non-theistic religion. It's a religion without deities.

That's a roundabout way of saying it's agnostic. Which is very embracing of atheism, generally speaking.

"Genius or not, is he a misanthrope?"

From Wikipedia: "Misanthropy is the general hatred, mistrust or disdain of the human species or human nature"

Nah, just a "difficult" person, at least based on our interactions in the '80s. He wasn't that bad a person to be around as long as you're not in one of his "bad" categories, i.e. there was a big change in our interactions where I started to work for "Software Hoarder" UniPress after previously working at e.g. Lisp Machine Inc.

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