[seebs]

That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.

Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really was NOT that big a deal), not everyone reacts to stress by treating people badly. Furthermore, people who didn't grow up around those OSS advocates have exactly the same problems sometimes, for the same reason that people in every field of human endeavor have those problems sometimes.

[prvc]

>I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it.

Participation in political mobs can serve as a surrogate replacement for empathy. A change in political allegiance is far easier to enact in an individual than a change in personality.

[AdmiralGinge]

That's very succinctly summed up something I often struggle to articulate.

[dudeinjapan]

Deep insight. Seriously. Happening across society.

[dguaraglia]

Would you agree then that participating in the 'anti-anti' mobs is also a possible form of feigned 'empathy'?

[lmm]

To the extent there is an anti-anti mob, sure.

Be skeptical of any actions that are hateful on their face, regardless of how impeccable the argument justifying them is. Judge people by whether they actually make your project nicer to be part of, not some theorycrafted definition of inclusivity. Common sense and human judgement are an infinitely better way to decide who to welcome, who to tolerate, and who to exclude (because some people have incompatible cultures, so any space will exclude some people), than any amount of political theory.

[prvc]

>Would you agree then that participating in the 'anti-anti' mobs is also a possible form of feigned 'empathy'?

You have misread the comment twice over. I wrote nothing that would preclude your scenario from being a possibility, and I also wrote nothing about assuming a false pretense. In my opinion, wrt "empathy", most of the mob participants are just fooling themselves, and the cynical drivers of these controversies tend to lean on empathy as an explanation less often, in favor of more opaque theoretical constructs.

[dguaraglia]

> You have misread the comment twice over.

I didn't.

> I wrote nothing that would preclude your scenario from being a possibility

That's kind of my point: there's a lot of questioning the motivations of the 'cancel culture mob' around these parts recently, but very little questioning of the motivations of the 'anti cancel culture mob'. It almost feels like there's a gaping blind spot there.

Unsurprisingly, a significant percentage of the 'anti cancel culture' controversy seems to be driven by a tiny fraction of people. One could even argue that both the 'cancel culture' and 'anti cancel culture' mobs are tiny. And yet, somehow, Hacker News seems to heavily favor the 'anti cancel culture' angle.

Go figure, huh?

[SpicyLemonZest]

I just don't agree with the symmetry you're drawing here. Pointing to a group of people and saying "I think they're engaged in a moral panic" doesn't make me part of an equal and opposite panic. If I were going around saying we've gotta ostracize the cancellers before they cancel us, that would certainly deserve some serious introspection - but I'm not, and neither is the original commenter.

[_euac]

While you might not be calling for ostracizing the cancellers, plenty of people out there are calling for exactly that.

There's a number of terms being used ('SJW', 'woke', 'cancel culture', 'cultural Marxism', etc.) to denigrate and quell any kind of discourse that goes against conservative talking points. I'd suggest you go and watch any of the self-described 'conservative comedians' to understand the level of otherization and systematic invalidation of any views that don't match theirs. Then come back here and tell me their behavior isn't as much of a moral panic as the supposed 'cancel culture'.

The fact that it is majorly powerful self-described Christian conservatives politicians that are constantly pushing the 'cancel culture' narrative should be a hint, don't you think?

[boulos]

What, if anything, would you update in your post from a decade ago [1] on Steve Jobs, RMS, and empathy?

(My guess is not much, other than maybe a personal preference on the empathy side?)

[1] https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2011/10/11/why-steve-jobs-did...

[seebs]

Haha, wow. I totally forgot I wrote that one.

When I wrote that I was unaware of some of the Sort Of Creepy stuff. I recognize that some of the allegedly creepy stuff is sorta misquoted. I think that matters. But I don't think it changes my overall conclusions, which is that RMS was acting in a way that he could reasonably predict would hurt or distress people, and he didn't think it was important to change this.

But I also note that, completely unaware of any of the allegations now being discussed, I thought he was bad for the development of free and open source software because he was bad at treating people in ways conducive to positive outcomes, and I knew many people who worked on free or open source software, or worked with the FSF or on FSF projects, who also felt that way. I believe quite a few of them had told him of these concerns.

I wrote about the specific more-recent RMS stuff last year: https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the...

Thomas Bushnell wrote about this, too, and honestly his post was much better: https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...

It is perhaps worth noting that, maybe thirty years ago, I had some run-ins with Thomas Bushnell, and I thought he was sort of a jerk at the time, but when I called him out on an example of that, he acknowledged it and apologized and said he'd try to do better. Nothing external to RMS was preventing RMS from doing that if people said his behavior hurt or distressed them.

The idea that we couldn't try to do better because we were being threatened by Microsoft is honestly sort of condescending and insulting in and of itself.

[preommr]

Is seebs someone that's particularly famous? The parent comment seems to imply they were part of the "Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al."

And their profile just says "that seebs".

[seebs]

I don't know about "particularly" famous but I know that I've talked to people whose family members were programmers who reacted with "wait you know SEEBS!?!" when they mentioned me, so apparently some people have heard of me. I used to be fairly active in Usenet discussions of C, and I've published some stuff, most of it now lost to the mists of time.