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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

It's time to retire the disputes about Terry's mental health and his use of racist language that perennially dominate these threads. These arguments are always the same, they lead nowhere of value, and it's wrong to gossip about a human being as a case specimen as if he weren't here.

We've had years of this already and it's enough. If someone wants to do the work of making a list of threads we've had about it in the past, we can all point to that the next time someone inevitably starts this controversy up again.

I'm not talking about Terry's technical work, of course. That is as on topic as anyone else's.

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>it's not right to gossip about a human being as a case specimen as if he weren't here.

Well said. Its infuriating the lack of common courtesy and sensitivity that people show in threads about his work.

It seems to me that he would, like most of us would in his situation, want to be judged on the merits of his work, without other people constantly framing in the context of his mental illness.

It would be easier if his posts were only bizzare or incoherent. Even his messia complex would probably be forgivable. The condescending, rude and racist things he says are just extremely hard to overlook. Giving one person a free pass at the expense of many others being able to come hear and not see racist, hateful speech tolerated. It's a shame as smart as he is he can't seem to figure out that certain terms are just not ok to use in a public forum (or anywhere really). I'm not even sure he means them as they are verbalized anyway.

Giving one person a free pass (...)

terry is given the exact opposite of a "free pass." he has created at least eight accounts at this site. all of them are now hellbanned.

Getting hellbanned for behaviour is not the opposite of a free pass, exact or otherwise.

And when he creates his 9th account and proceeds to use the n-word to insult people he feels are intellectually inferior to him - that one will be hellbanned as well, and rightly so in my opinion.

The guy learned how to write compilers and operating systems, surely he is capable of learning to stop using that term - at least on this forum.

If he didn't have schizophrenia, i'd completely agree with you. As it is, i'm not sure he is capable of learning to stop using any particular terms. At least not during an episode.

This is an example of the perennial dispute that we're talking about. It's (a) not ok to begin with, and (b) endless regurgitation. It's time to stop.

There should be a separation of the person and their work. Hubble had unsavory views, but those do not come up when discussing the speed of galaxies.

Indeed. Newton was a devout alchemist/occultist who believed he could find the temple of Solomon - but it doesn't make gravitation or his laws of motion irrelevant.

You two are conflating scientific discoveries with products. Gravity existed before Newton discovered it. He didn't create it. Likewise, it is fine to consider the theory of relativity without going into Einstein's childhood or upbringing or other personal traits of his.

It is, however, absolutely essential to take into account the person behind a product when evaluating a product. You would never write an essay on the film stylings of Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski without fully considering their backgrounds and personality quirks. You would certainly never write about a work of classic literature without first taking into account the context of when the book was written, what life experiences the author had, or what inspired the author to write such a book.

Products like TempleOS should be treated the same.

There's a difference between using information about an author to help analyze the thought process behind their work and using information about an author to prejudge their work. I can analyze Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing based on his belief in spiritualism, but that isn't the same as labeling Sherlock Holmes blasphemy. You are confounding evaluating purpose and evaluating quality. If I was writing an essay on the origins of TempleOS, then knowing the personal life of the creator helps. If I'm evaluating the quality of the software, then information on Terry is irrelevant.

It is not absolutely essential to do anything of the sort - that's one of the central arguments of the post-structuralist movement in critical theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism#General_prac...

Product? Howabout the transistor. Look up William Shockley. Brilliant but filled with hate.

His mental health directly impacts and influences what he writes.

As is true of anyone. Not seeing the point here.

That what he has written, complete with its oracle, and his communication style/content is directly a product of his unusual mental state.

It's notable because he writes the software in ways that someone without his condition would not consider. You can't separate the two.

The threads aren't full of sensitive analyses of the design of TempleOS. They're full of unseemly gossip and flamewars that are the same every time. That's what I'm calling off-topic. As moderation calls go, the distinction doesn't seem like a difficult one.

The guidelines already cover this when they say: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

Some of his remarks are actually technical and relevant but invisible to most people (only accounts with the show-dead-threads flag active can see them). It would be nice if one could sponsor just those comments, I think would be a good thing for him too.

We're working on that.

And yet what he writes can be judged on its own merits. Only in issues of trust should character come into the question. I am most familiar with an attack on character being a technique that allows for a person to dismiss some writing without effort.

If someone with a mental illness writes a word salad, it can be dismissed as a word salad, not because the write has mental issues, but becasue the writing is a word salad.

That said, it takes time to read and judge the merits of a writing, and give a limit to our time we all develop heuristics to help us determine to help us avoid wasting time.

You can start by un-hellbanning him if you want to treat him like a human being.

It is failing to treat someone as a human being. You are ignoring them because you perceive their mental illness to be dangerous. You're failing to make eye contact with him, because you think he is an animal.

The admins on this site need to do a lot of soul searching if they are ok with this. And now I'm hellbanned for speaking up for terry. Fuck you hackernews.

Lots of human beings are hellbanned. Anyone else who posted the way he does would, almost certainly, be hellbanned.

Hellbanning is not failing to treat him like a human being.

If you want to make the argument that there is a good reason consistent with the purpose of the community to excuse conduct in his case that would otherwise merit hellbanning, that might be an argument with merit -- without the argument being made, I don't see it, but it might be there. But, in any case, that's not am argument you've made.

Agree. Hellbanning is a step too far. If you're going to ban someone, just kill their account honestly, not let them toil away posting.

The moderators' time and effort is valuable too. If someone reacts to a normal ban by creating new accounts and continuing their previous behaviour, what use is there in telling them that their behaviour is not acceptable if they refuse to listen?

That's the price of running a community on the internet.

Bear in mind I've run forums with 50,000+ subscribers and was an EFnet and Quakenet IRC op.

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