[donsupreme]

> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. The crimes included: “being super involved with Wikipedia,” retweeting a “hideous” New York Times editorial, and being friendly with famed democracy activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig. Publicly calling out each board member in turn with a clear implication: associate with a thought criminal and you too could be in jeopardy.

Did she really do that? wow

[b215826]

She spends a considerable fraction of her day turning non-issues (such as the term "domain driven design" [1]) into major issues. I really empathize with her coworkers; it must be really difficult to work with a person like this.

[1]: https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273

[Clewza313]

> Last night I posted about the term “domain driven design,” frequently abbreviated “DDD” - which is a common large bra measurement in the US, & often part of dirty movie titles.

...wow.

Also, did she just call human sexuality "dirty"? I would have thought that was a cancellable offense these days.

[tomjen3]

>often part of dirty movie titles.

As always, one wonders how she knows this.

[b215826]

She read about it in People.

[dragonwriter]

No, she called porn dirty. Movies about human sexuality that aren't porn exist, but aren't likely to have DDD in their titles.

(Not that I am endorsing anything she says.)

[yarg]

Fuck me, does she know about automatated teller machines?

[duck]

Here is the thread in question: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1172283772428906496.html

[ComputerGuru]

This is some McCarthy level witch-hunting:

> The fourth @fsf board member is Benjamin Mako Hill - @makoshark - seems super involved with Wikipedia, which is also known as an extremely hostile community towards women.

What a leap! Just make crazy allegations and move on to the next name on the list!

I always post online knowing someone might come digging, but I didn’t realize the bar for extortion-worthy material was this low.

[square_usual]

It's also amazingly stupid because a lot of Benjamin Mako Hill's work is in maintaining communities. He used to post about them: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/

[tryonenow]

And how laughable, given wikipedia's heavy progressive bias. These people seek out and peddle victimhood as currency. Truly McArthy-esque, to see villains (in our times "oppressors") behind every shadow...

Even manufactured self righteousness must be addictive.

[eganist]

> given wikipedia's heavy progressive bias.

Do you have a robust academic citation for this?

None of the sources here (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedi...) suggest a heavy bias, and overall it seems that bias is attenuated with stronger participation.

I haven't been able to find sources other than those linked.

[etchalon]

It seems to me that being fact-oriented, especially when preferring facts from authorities and institutions, tends to get a source labeled as liberal-biased.

[tryonenow]

The trouble is that even if these facts are unambiguously correct, their reporting can be misleading, by interpretation, implication, conjecture, selective reporting, and/or omission. That's how bias is injected even into "factual" reporting, and why reality's "liberal bias" may just be a reflection of the predominant institutional bias in popular media.

[throwawaysea]

All Sides has an article noting the left leaning bias of Wikipedia, including references to five different studies. It also mentions how the cofounder of Wikipedia has called out the site’s liberal bias: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

Personally, I see it in articles on any topic that is controversial, particularly along the axis of the left-right divide in America. Wikipedia is a theater for activism/ideology just like every other space (like our work places) has been opted into the same war in the last 5 years or so. It is most apparent to me when I read an article about influential or popular figures who are moderate or right wing.

[tryonenow]

No, not every conjecture has been researched. But if you're at all familiar with editorial policy on wikipedia, you'll know that only mainstream sources are typically treated as WP:reliablesource (e.g. wapo, huffpo, cnn, nbc, occasionally salon and vox tier) and the vast majority of right leaning sources (aside from fox) are effectively blacklisted. Not to mention the regular editorial bullying on politically sensitive pages that reinforces the bias by chasing away neutral or non-progressive leaning editors with alternative points of view.

Also if the allegation is that wikipedia has an editorial bias, I wouldn't necessarily trust wikipedia's own evaluation of it's bias.

[0xFluegel]

> … the vast majority of right leaning sources (aside from fox) are effectively blacklisted.

This reminds me of a past blog post, a few weeks ago or so, from a journalist who spoke about how strongly right leaning "journalists" often think of their writing as political influencing and counter-acting the left journalism.

I don't know how true that really is but such a tendency could be a good faith explanation for such a rule (as long as it has exceptions).

[lsiebert]

What heavy progressive bias is that?

[mdoms]

This is hideous. We should not let people like this dictate the direction of our industry.

[1024core]

This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".

[smsm42]

Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.

[tablespoon]

> Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.

That solution to trolling has never worked and never will. The reason is that it requires near complete agreement and coordination between uncoordinated individuals, which is impossible for any but the smallest groups. There's always someone who's too new or who doesn't want to get with the program who will engage.

[smsm42]

It doesn't require complete agreement - it does require same level of agreement and cooperation that allows us to have common language, common culture, common laws, Open Source projects, charities, etc. Just a common understanding that empowering people that thrive on tearing down and destroying others is bad for everybody, and we should not fall for any noble words they veil themselves with and see through it to the core of power lust and zeal for destruction.

Yes, there will always be those who do not abide for the societal convention for one reason or another. Cultures have dealt with this problem for millenia, it's not something new. As soon as we succeed in developing a common norm of not enabling the cancel trolls, we will have cultural mechanisms of maintaining this norm, as we maintain many other societal norms that allow us to exist as a culture and a society.

[tablespoon]

> It doesn't require complete agreement - it does require same level of agreement and cooperation that allows us to have common language, common culture, common laws, Open Source projects, charities, etc....

> Yes, there will always be those who do not abide for the societal convention for one reason or another.

I mean, as far as I can tell, the "societal convention" you're advocating for doesn't exist as such, so you lack even the minimal "some level of agreement" that your tactic requires.

[strogonoff]

The very uncoordinated cooperation you’re talking about happens a lot in the other direction these days, and is perfectly possible in this direction as well. The problem is that “free” ad-based social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) feeds on user engagement, and the more of their users feed the troll the higher their ad revenue.

While not feeding the troll is perfectly reasonable and there’s enough people with sufficient common sense, we all are quite vulnerable to letting GUI patterns slip past our logical thinking and speak directly to system 1. The GUI is powerful in this way, and arguably it’s never really neutral. In case of “free” social media, it promotes action, it makes the “like” action the most effortless, it feeds likes into recommendations, and so on. Not feeding the troll goes against everything it stands for.

I’ll probably never shut up about it, but I believe making social media paid rather than ad-driven is what has the power to address this issue in the most reasonable way. Paid social media should be normalized.

[undefined1]

Dexter Rule for Cancellation: only cancel serial cancelers

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1353387857138872320

[visarga]

Pedro Domingos has published an article about how to combat cancel culture.

> Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence

https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...

TL;DR: Find your friends, Know what to expect, Don’t back down, Don’t let them make it about you, Hold the moral high ground, Mock them mercilessly, Don’t let their narrative outrun yours, Goad them into overreaching, Turn their weapons against them, Use the courts, Bring administrators around

He has had some success in dealing with Anima Anandkumar and her mob on Twitter.

[throwawaysea]

I am still in shock at what Anima Anandkumar attempted and cannot believe that she is still employed by Nvidia. It’s hard for me to view them as anything but safe harbor for aggressive totalitarian ideologues when someone like that is permitted to remain in a highly visible position. For those who aren’t familiar, Wikipedia has a brief summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_Anandkumar#Public_Contro...

[visarga]

She only cooled off when Pedro sent a complaint to NVIDIA. Apparently the threat of cancelling works.

A quote from PD:

> I have reached out to @NeurIPSConf, @Caltech and @NVIDIA about curtailing @AnimaAnandkumar's disgraceful behavior. Let's see how they respond.

[ryandrake]

This is why you should just ignore “people on Twitter.” People like this only have power if you pay attention to them. I’m not on Twitter and have never been. People could be “canceling” me there right now and I’d have no idea, and it wouldn’t affect me in the slightest. We give people power by paying undue attention to them.

[cgriswald]

I know someone (no friend of mine) who said some indefensible things on social media. He ended up losing his job not because of what he said, but because people found where he worked and called up threats against his employers. That wasn’t enough. They also found out where he lived, graffitied and egged his house, made personal threats. I don’t know whatever happened to the guy but the last I heard he had his roommates lying, claiming he had moved.

If you get canceled, it doesn’t happen on Twitter.

[smsm42]

I was on Twitter once, and one day I logged out of my account and threw away the password. I never regretted it so far. I had to tell people several times that I do not use twitter, but it never been any problem whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is still some content that is exclusive to Twitter, because some smart and otherwise reasonable people insist on putting it there. I wish they would choose any other platform.

[AdmiralGinge]

I think Twitter in general is such a harmful thing. There's very little worth saying that can be compressed into 280 characters beyond "I'm right, you're wrong, anyone who disagrees with my subjective opinion is scum" yet somehow it's become the platform of choice for journalism in general.

[abdulmuhaimin]

either the reason is weak, or you're just not important enough to cancel.

cancel culture is not just mean comment. Affecting real life in every possible way is also one of its goal. Its basically modern day witch hunt. No way ignoring Twitter gonna solve that problem

[agumonkey]

Honest question, is that attention is seeking or is it overload (various forms of pain, sadness, frustration) turning his/her brain into a distorted accusation machine ?

[qiqitori]

I just took a look at her recent Tweets and TBH she doesn't seem much different from Stallman. Confrontational and set in her ways -- her mission just appears to be different from Stallman's mission and they crossed paths in an unfortunate manner. Both have great missions, and she shouldn't be "cancelled" either. (Stupid word, surely there had to be a better one)

[krastanov]

I think Stallman's monomaniacal adherence to logic and rigor sets them very much apart.

[nullc]

Ironic that even that rant could be characterized as misogynistic in how it dispenses its ire:

One person in the list is a former chair of the Wikimedia board (and wikipedia arbitration committee member), the another is an academic whom among many other things has written some papers on Wikipedia.

Yet it's the second person-- a man-- the author uses "seems super involved with Wikipedia" as a smear against, the first -- a woman-- is ignored.

While I'm sure she welcomed dodging that harassment, it's kind of sad that even when supposedly defending women this speaker seems doesn't take them seriously.

Equality should include equality in being targeted with rediculous smears. :)

[innagadadavida]

Has anyone done any investigations whether she had a profit motive doing what she did? Did she get paid by someone? Did she just do it out of spite to RMS? Or just to get plain attention?

[young_unixer]

She's been doing this for the last ~4 years or so.

Everytime I stumble upon her name, it's never for a good reason, it's always some sort of controversy or attack against someone, so I would say no, it's not money, she actually is that way.

[Dma54rhs]

At what point more people start calling out mental illness?

[kstenerud]

This is how societies work when there's no rule of law (or no respect for it, or insufficient coverage or enforcement of the issue). Things get really ugly really fast.

[matheusmoreira]

It's like we're back in the middle ages.