[juletide]

> To my mind, though, it’s important not to minimize the gravity of the fateful decision by conflating it with everything that preceded it. I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers.

This seems like such an oddly prickly and defensive bit to throw into the middle of the essay? I have no idea why Aaronson is nervous about being associated with SBF ("both were affiliated with the same large research university at some point in time" hardly seems damning), nor what on earth these charges about disrespect to women are about. Am I missing something?

[Tomte]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/the-blo...

(Paywall avoidance: https://archive.ph/MdZa2)

[andsoitis]

But what does it have to do with, or how does it relate to, the SBF fraud?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I really enjoyed his book and have learned an enormous amount from his blog on QM, QC, etc.

However, it's clear he has some very neurotic attitudes surrounding sexuality. I don't say this lightly and without empathy. I was raised by evangelical extremists. I'm talking the kind of people where the school I went to debated whether it was sinful to allow the girls to wear pants instead of dresses during a blizzard. I never received any form of sex education or guidance on the topic. You get the basic picture. I get where he's coming from.

But he's just wrong to be so overly concerned about being seen as a sexual predator. I don't know what the solution for him his other that introspection and perhaps therapy, but I do wish he'd have enough self awareness to realize that perhaps, this is not the topic he should be offering sage like advice blogs about.

[mjburgess]

The whole piece, "the geometry of conscience" is about guilt-by-association.

Rather than use the phrase, he takes "association" to be a distance metric, and guilt to be a measure of conscience.

I'd suppose quite a lot of people have, of late, felt the "guilt by association" culture inimical to a lot of social media. This is just his way of illustrating its impact on him.

A woman in a leadership position might likewise have said, "and I'm supposed to be JK Rowling, ..."