[glangdale]

I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.

Suppose there is some future society that has decided that weird stinky dudes that make inappropriate remarks, stare at women's tits and compulsively hit on attractive women who are just trying to exist in a professional setting are actually A-OK. Why is that society's alleged values superior to our own?

If we are trending towards a direction that makes what we now regard as sexual harassment ok (again) then I would say we're going in the wrong way, and there's no more reason to regard that hypothetical futures' values as better than ours, any more than we regard the 1950s values better now.

This doesn't remotely analogize to "gay rights" or racial tolerance, etc. Being enraged/uncomfortable about, say, interracial marriage or consensual gay relationships was always a matter of people becoming involved in things that were none of their damn business (e.g. "I'm angry about what those gays are doing behind closed doors") or denying them to right to participate in society as equals. Not liking stuff like sexual harassment is something we do because of its effect on the person involved (e.g. "it's hard to be taken seriously as a professional and feel that I have dignity when Stallman makes remarks about my virginity and stares at my tits") or others like them.

IMO second guessing what you think (?) and say is hardly all that difficult. People could go a long way by (a) being kind and (b) acting (shock horror) professional in a professional context and not trying to use the workplace to get dates or get laid, and (c) shutting the hell up once in a while rather than treating us to their opinions about Every Goddamn Thing. Honestly, the sheer egomania of Stallman deciding the whole world needed to hear his thoughts on underage sex is pretty wild.

[yocheckitdawg]

The argument isn't that enabling weird dudes to inappropriately hit on women is the progress we are after, that is a complete misunderstanding of the point.

The argument is that often renegade and maverick thinkers are deeply deeply flawed on an individual level and would do stuff like that. This doesn't really fit well into the "progress category" of civil rights, it's more about advances in technology.

TBH I don't know jack about Richard Stallman, but my understanding is he played a huge role in developing the idea of free software which has had enormous benefit to the world in general.

The question is does the benefit the ideas and works of Richard Stallman have brought warrant the personal costs he has imposed on many people around him? And in the future, are the potential personal costs another Richard Stallman would bring worth the advances they could bring in another area?

To put it even more bluntly, will it be possible to have the types of significant progress we desire in technology or what area, while excluding people who on a more personal level we find deeply problematic? Can the best parts of a Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs be separated from the worst parts? Can we in a sense "sanitise" progress so that only people we find socially acceptable are the ones who will do it? What if the people who will do most for humanity's collective properity are (a) assholes (b) unprofessional, and (c) never the shut the hell up about stuff they know nothing about?

I don't have an answer here, but it is going to be an issue worth thinking about going into the future.

[glangdale]

I'm not sure that the entire careers of a Stallman or a Jobs are inseparable from them acting like dickheads at some point in their career.

It may be the case that having "Future Stallman" or "Future Jobs" be persuaded to rein in their excesses (rather than being tolerated and encouraged to be raging assholes, at least in some contexts and ways) might be of benefit both to the people around them, but also, the talented individuals themselves.

Maybe we can apply discussions of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" also to badly behaved white middle class people too, and they could do better?

[thatcat]

There's no future Jobs or Stallman who is going to change the status quo of technology, but be agreeable and not neurotic.

[glangdale]

First of all, this is bullshit. There are plenty of perfectly agreeable people in computing who have had massive impact. I've met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, for example, and both were kind and pleasant people. I don't recall hearing that Berners-Lee is anything but pleasant. While there are plenty of disagreeable sorts (I hear Dijkstra was a bit of a Djick) there is by no means a hard and fast rule that those who change the status quo of technology are dickheads. And some of the people who were neurotic aren't necessarily bad to other people, and historically, it's easy to point to some people who might have had much saner lives but for the times they lived in (Alan Turing).

Second, even the people like Jobs and Stallman can moderate their toxic behavior towards other people if incentives are in place. That doesn't mean that they will be normal. They will almost certainly continue to be rude, abrupt, and a little weird. They don't have to be nice.

There's something bizarrely fetishistic about the assumption that letting people like Jobs and Stallman do whatever they want is essential to their success. It's like Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength.

[yocheckitdawg]

Few differences here though.

Thompson and Ritchie were technical pioneers but weren't philosophical pioneers. Their work was entirely about implementing technical solutions, it had nothing to do with the philosophical structure within which those solutions were made.

Jobs and Stallman were different. They had strong and assertive views about how technology "should" be, not just how things would get done.

Jobs was all about accessible, easy to use, and sexy being important to technology.

Stallman is all about resisting the influence on corporate and governmental interests on the development of software.

I mean look at this list of suggestions Stallman made to Microsoft. https://mspoweruser.com/richard-stallmans-10-suggestions-to-... This is entirely about the philosophy of how computer software development should occur, not really anything to do with the technical aspects of it.

Richard Stallman sounds like a bit of a paranoid nutter. Is it safe to assume that his paranoia and personal idiosyncrasies can be separated from his philosophical views of the world (many of which are fundamentally about empowering the individual technology user against corporate and governmental interests which many of us agree with)? The jury is out on that one imo. He has seeded his ideas successfully and now they permeate the culture so perhaps he as an individual is no longer necessary to the movement.

But what about the next Stallman? A man or woman with a vision of how the world should or could be that is informed by their personal flaws? Will they be determined as to problematic to be involved in the industry and we will lose out on a unique way of looking at the world that would leave as all better off? I don't know. None of us do. It's an open question.

[jamesrcole]

> I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.

I was reponding to these statements "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you.". This is clearly talking about all cases where there's potential for causing hurt and pain, not the one specific case you're talking about.

You didn't address one of the main points in my comment: who gets to decide which views are harmful?

And when I talked about social progress, I didn't just mean that which has already occurred. There are things which are today considered offensive and harmful, that in the future will be considered just and good. This has always been the case, for any moment in time. If we decide it's important to shut down all offensive speech, it makes it much harder for society to evolve and improve.

[glangdale]

You're looking for a neutral principle that doesn't exist. Why is the trajectory of society towards "evolving and improving" assumed here? Why is someone's view of what is "just and good" in the future automatically better? What if we wind up in a dystopia and reintroduce slavery? Is that automatically "better" because it's out there in the future?

At this point people usually go looking for a get out of jail free card where they can conjure up a neutral principle and say "no, I meant progress towards good things", which of course "begs the question" in the classic sense.

[jamesrcole]

The principle I'm arguing for does not involve any specific view of what "better" is.

A norm of shutting down someone whenever a number of people consider that person's views or actions to be offensive or harmful will stifle change. It will stifle all change and evolution of norms and beliefs. It's an authoritarian impulse that will only ratchet up restrictions on what can be said and done.

If such a norm had been in place in the last few hundred years, it would have severely hampered all the past changes that are now widely agreed to have been good things.

[glangdale]

I think you've 100% missed the point here, but it's late, and I can't channel any more of Stanley Fish's "The Trouble with Principle" (very recommended, and readable) at this hour.

[jamesrcole]

I'd remind you that this subthread is all under my response to a comment which said "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you.".