Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

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No, people are not mean to him because he has a mental disorder. People are mean to him because he posts things like this:

A nigger respects complicated programs. The more complicated the more the little niggers respect it. Ask a nigger to design a operating system task scheduler! It's hilarious watching a nigger make priority schedulers. I make my programs simple. I have an electrical engineering degree. I am a master of differential equations. Physics>Engineer>Computer Science> Psychology. The nigger standard model is 20 pages instead of two and it's really really complicated. When a computer scientist builds something he says, "What all features might we possibly need?" When I design I make it as simple as possible. Hello world joke: http://www.infiltec.com/j-h-wrld.htm Look at what the nigger did to graphic files formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format Sound file formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV Any nigger can make it complicated. A nigger makes it as complicated as possible. I am a genius. I make it simple.

And you think he posts things like that because he's sane?

There are plenty of people who are not "sane" who don't hold and espouse those opinions, and I doubt anyone would take such umbrage with those people, so it's unreasonable and disingenuous to suggest that people are "mean to him because he has a mental disorder".

Do you really think the quote you posted has the slightest thing to do with race? I realize that in it he repeatedly uses a very bad word, but, bad as it may be, it is merely a word; I should like to hope some allowance might be made for the very plain fact that the man's mind isn't right, to say nothing of the minor point that, allowing for differences in phrasing and style, even a luminary like Paul Graham might well make the very same argument about unnecessary complexity.

Then again, when even a luminary like Paul Graham has to be careful about what he can and can't say [1], I suppose it's not too surprising that people should care more about the style of Mr. Davis's remarks than about their substance.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

If someone you didn't know were posting these things as, say, YouTube comments, it would still be immediately apparent that their "mind isn't right", as you put it, but of course it would be perfectly acceptable to write them off. The allowance you're making is really because he's inside the group that HN readers have an interest in. If he wasn't a programmer, he would be just another religious nut to you.

You presume a hell of a lot, don't you?

I can't tell if you're saying "people shouldn't have to hear racism around them even if the person is mentally ill" (so shadowban it or whatever) or if you're saying "mental illness is not the reason that person's racist" (so I am free to pass moral judgment on them.)

Neither. I'm saying that people are responding to the words in his posts, rather than the underlying cause of those words. They're not saying, "Ugh, a mentally ill person, hate", they're saying "Wow, that's pretty offensive, hate".

In contrast, when the artwork of a schizophrenic gets posted (there's a particular one that pops up from time to time), people mostly respond with fascination.

But that's just the point. The words in question aren't any more charged with racialist intent than would be an equivalent work by the same person in a nonverbal medium, but one of those words in particular is linked to a reflex response called "offense", which apparently is so exceptional as to preclude any further analysis whatsoever even in people who don't fall within the group for whom the reflex-trigger word is a slur, and who therefore by definition cannot be insulted by its use.

I don't know, maybe it's just me. But when I see a lot of different people who've all apparently been trained to react identically and without thought or consideration to a given set of triggers, regardless of any context in which those triggers occur, it creeps me out just a little.

When you say the post is disingenuous, you are implying intent on the part of the poster. I don't see that (I don't disagree with your point that the characterization is inaccurate though).

How literal is your meaning when you say "Wow, that's pretty offensive, hate" below? Because I think hatred directed at a bigot is sort of a not very fruitful response to bigotry. In that sense, people being nasty because someone is saying offensive things isn't a huge improvement over people being nasty because someone is mentally ill.

I do see some need to deal with people that are being disruptive (whether intentionally or not), but I don't see much justification to do it with rancor.

That account was made 5 months ago. I remember this guy from at least 2 years ago when his project got attention on Reddit. Is it really him with that 5 month old account?

In any case, I don't know much about the guy. I just remember his posts being a little off... that might explain it but he is suffering from schizophrenia if I remember it correctly.

he makes new accounts regularly to get around bans/killed status.

What's your point? Just reading the WP entry on WAV seems to back him up; it wouldn't be too hard to beat it if you just want a simple PCM format.

As for the racial slurs, they obviously are not racial in this context.

Otherwise, perhaps he's a bit immodest or incorrect. OTOH, he's brighter than most so...

s/nigger/idiot/g

There, I fixed it. Do try and use the brain God gave you.

> I fixed it

Really? You think that that change would make him likeable?

> Do try and use the brain God gave you.

Sorry, but I don't understand the purpose of that snarky comment. Do you disagree that the kind of post in the example I gave is why people are mean to him? It makes not a jot of difference that you "fixed" his post here (for whose benefit, I don't know), because he posts what he posts, and people read what he posts, and make their judgements based on that.

People are mean to him because people are rude jerks, and probably unlike Terry, have opted to be purposefully mean to somebody.

It's really annoying to me to see people get so caught up in the phrasing of an otherwise intelligible statement (due to trigger words or blatant racism or whatever) that they can't respond to it on its own merits.

Also, at this point, anybody who believes Terry is genuinely racist is obviously too incompetent to do research--it's pretty easy to find if you do any searching on the topic.

> People are mean to him because people are rude jerks

Yes, but the issue was why people are mean to him (as in, what are they responding to?), not why people are mean in general.

It's a fact of life that you will be judged on how you present yourself. And quite reasonably so -- you can't realistically expect that people are going to search the Internet for clues to every poster's mental health history before they form an opinion of them. That's simply not their responsibility. If at this point I were to call you something unpleasant, you would immediately form an opinion of me without doing any searching on the topic of my mental health. The evidence suggests you might even respond rudely.

Back before his project was called TempleOS, back when it was LoseThos, I didn't know his state of mind. Ran into some of the more disjoint and horribly worded statements on his sites and had no problems sussing out the wheat from the chaff.

In short, you don't need research to know when someone is off a bit. Our minds are great at pattern matching, but we get /lots/ of false positives. It's up to the higher level bits of our consciousness to figure out which is which. You just need to know what real tolerance and understanding is and fight off the urge to react to things on the surface.

Literally no-one in their right minds are going to write like that and expect to be taken seriously. Outright overt racism like what you claim you see in his posts just doesn't make sense in the contexts of code.

Now it looks like a perfectly sane and predictably off-putting piece of self-aggrandization. "I have a degree that is in a superior discipline relative to computer science." "Unlike most other programmers, I know my differential equations." "My ideas and approaches are better than those of all these other idiots." "I am a genius compares to those who invent complex solutions."

Of course people hate this, even without the random sprinkling of "nigger".

And the choice of that word reveals obvious racism. It says, I dislike blacks to the point that a word denoting them serves me as metaphor for other groups of people or concepts I revile.

"And the choice of that word reveals obvious racism."

Nice armchair psychology--maybe it's chosen because it's considered taboo, instead of because of some deep-seated dislike of blacks?

Deep-rooted dislike or not, it is certainly disregard. Using that word, and in those ways, shows disregard for how a person of African descent might feel who reads that comment.

Fair enough, though that depends on whether or not you believe somebody with that form of mental illness is capable of disregard at the same standard.

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