[kragen]

Free software is a matter of freedom, not price. But your comment contradicts itself.

Your posited opposition between "what is best for the students" and "what is best to support some ideology" is without foundation — different ideologies differ precisely in that they make different claims about what is best for people, such as students. Whatever set of claims you endorse about "what is best for the students" constitutes an ideology.

Now, it may be that there is no objectively correct ideology — that, for example, it's just as valid to celebrate the mass human sacrifice of the Khmer Rouge killing fields as an inspiring example of class struggle, as Pol Pot did, as to deplore it as a violation of fundamental human rights. I do not believe this, but some people do.

But you do not seem to be taking such a purely moral-relativist position — instead, you are arguing that MIT "should make sure that students get their software and materials free of charge" and "should use what is best for the students". That is, you are attempting to promote your own ideology about how MIT should teach its classes, arguing that MIT should prefer your ideology to Gerald Jay Sussman's ideology and, implicitly, that MIT's administration should order him to choose different software with which to teach his classes. You are attempting to camouflage your attempted imposition of your own ideology on MIT under a dishonest implicit claim that your own point of view is free of any ideology.

As it happens, MIT does not adhere to your ideology; instead it adheres to an ideology known as "academic freedom", which holds, among other things, that professors and other instructors have fairly wide latitude to choose their manner of teaching, the material they will teach, and the points of view they will express, which easily extends to the choices in question. When the modern ideology of academic freedom was forged in, mostly, the German universities of the 18th and 19th century, it brought them to the frontier of human knowledge and made them the leaders in advancing it; nowadays many of the universities most faithful to this ideology are in the United States, but the principles are the same.

Your call for MIT to abandon its principles and suppress academic freedom, mendaciously cloaked behind a spurious claim of ideological neutrality, is deplorable.

You should not have posted it.

(To preempt some comments, not only do I not teach at MIT or any other university, I've never attended MIT and I didn't even graduate from college; and MIT, roughly speaking, bullied a friend of mine to suicide. This is not about group loyalty.)

[bildung]

> celebrate the mass human sacrifice of the Khmer Rouge killing fields as an inspiring example of class struggle, as MIT professor Noam Chomsky did

This obviously never happened. What Chomsky and Herman instead did was criticizing the media portrayals of the Khmer Rouge vs. the US bombings that took place at the same time, killing 600000 civilians in Cambodia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal).

[kragen]

I appreciate the correction. You are partly correct; Chomsky did not in fact celebrate the sacrifices, but rather urged people to doubt their reality, in 1977, at which point doubting them was perhaps more reasonable than it is today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... https://chomsky.info/19770625/

That article was written before the worst of the killings happened in 1978, though it still seems outrageous to me that it blames the bad conditions in Cambodia on US bombings killing water buffalo; Chomsky touts "the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it" and describes reports that “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” as "fallacious", saying that they "collapse[] under the barest scrutiny".

The US bombings were indeed terrible, but (as the page you link explains) they did not kill anywhere close to the 600k people you claim, and they happened earlier than the Khmer Rouge killing fields, not at the same time.

I have corrected my comment to instead make the more defensible, though still perhaps controvertible, claim that Pol Pot celebrated the sacrifices in that way.

[systemvoltage]

I found your response, regardless of the stance, absolutely rude.

It’s important to understand and try to find why that person is thinking this way than to shut them down in the manner you have, again with the same subjective ideology that the parent is commenting on.

[kragen]

> It’s important to understand and try to find why that person is thinking this way

Yeah? Try it, then.

[systemvoltage]

On HN, as the topic gets more divisive, please be nice and respectful.

Think about, the other person is not stupid to feel so passionate or strongly about something. There must beSome reason. Peel the layers until you get to the bottom of it. IMO, that’s so much more interesting to study than to ignore them.

Humanity gets better when we try to get out of a local optima. When we do don’t explore radical voices, and instead ignore them, we have no possible way to wiggle out of the uncanny valley. This refactoring if you will, of the human progress guided by logical reasoning, understanding of trade offs, gathering empirical data and studying behavior is paramount to a peaceful and harmonious society.

I urge you to please listen to others and ask them why they think that way. What are the pros and cons of a particular approach. Be honest and seek truth.

[kragen]

My criticism of our other interlocutor is certainly not that they are stupid. It is precisely that their rhetoric is dishonest, sabotaging precisely the dialectical process you claim to be concerned with fostering. If that's your concern, shouldn't you be criticizing them for their dishonest framing, not me?

Moreover, what they are attacking is that Sussman is enabling his students to study the software the course is run on, so they can understand its tradeoffs and guide human progress by logical reasoning, rather than treating the software as impenetrable black boxes they are forbidden to investigate and powerless to change; and they are attacking MIT's adherence to the ideology of academic freedom, one of the most effective ways to explore radical voices, get out of local optima, and seek truth.

I notice that you still haven't posted a response to their comment, whether criticizing their dishonesty as your stance implies you should, or attempting to understand their point of view as you are urging me to do. If you think it's important to find out why that person is thinking this way, then why are you making no effort to do so, instead attempting to influence me?

My best guess is that you're just feeding me a line of bullshit that you think will persuade me, rather than saying anything you sincerely believe, since your behavior in this thread is precisely the opposite of the behavior you are advocating.

Or, more briefly: "Yeah? Try it, then."