[jiggy2011]

I'm curious, how does ESR make a living? He seems to spend a lot of time running his personal site (which carries no charges or ads) and has written a bunch of Open Source software. I don't see him doing anything that would put money into his bank account, or is he being sponsored by some company? If so who?

[jgon]

I am going to simply go by what ESR himself says, which is that his wife is a lawyer and so she goes and works every day which funds his ability to stay at home and write blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of black people and how the poor deserve no government help. No I am not making this up.

[pjscott]

You might as well be making up the part about black people. I checked, and ESR's actual argument is that black people have a lower average IQ than caucasians even after adjusting for things like socioeconomic status and childhood nutrition, that this IQ difference has significant effects on the observed distributions of things like income and crime, and that these same statistics prove that racial discrimination against individual people is idiotic, since the relatively weak Bayesian evidence from someone's race is greatly outweighed by, say, actually talking to that person for half a minute. (He makes exactly the same claim about caucasians having a lower average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews, BTW.) In addition to these claims about fact, he also makes the normative claim that racism is immoral.

I know that doesn't make quite as snazzy a sound-bite as "the intellectual inferiority of black people".

[raganwald]

From time to time I go slumming and read the kind of thing Mr. Raymond has written, things like:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4278

He quotes something which appears to be backed up by statistics, then carries off into some social speculation. He rails against “political correctness” muzzling the truth. I have read similar things from people who feel a need to “have an honest conversation about the actions of Israel in the Middle East.” And like wise from people who can cite in detail the various horrors inflicted by the legal system against men who are tricked or trapped into biological paternity. All quite possibly true facts to share, of course.

It’s a massive Ad Hominem on my part, but I can’t help but wonder when I read such passionate words, “Why is this person fixated on this particular topic?” We all have our passions, some of us have crusades. What compels a programmer to take it upon himself to fight the injustice of a society that walks on eggshells about the various differences between the “races?”

I’m not going to say he’s a racist. I’ll say instead he’s a man fixated on race. And I’ll wield the Ad Hominem hammer again and suggest, although he may be a pragmatic voice for the open source movement, where society is concerned he comes across as every bit as fanatic as his accusations.

[orangecat]

It’s a massive Ad Hominem on my part, but I can’t help but wonder when I read such passionate words, “Why is this person fixated on this particular topic?”

Because in their view, which may or may not be correct, they are injustices which receive very little mainstream attention. Is that not enough?

I’m not going to say he’s a racist.

I'm not going to say that John Doe has ever had any inappropriate relations with his students.

[raganwald]

Because in their view, which may or may not be correct, they are injustices which receive very little mainstream attention. Is that not enough?

Enough for you, not enough for me. That’s how human behaviour works. You may meet someone who goes on and on about men’s rights and think, “here is a fellow who has encountered injustices which receive very little mainstream attention, how perfectly ordinary.” Someone else may beet the same fellow and be disquieted by their choice of injustice which receives very little mainstream attention they have picked as their fixation.

And I didn’t say he’s a racist. Pointless waste of time when discussing a man who wrote an essay asking for the word “racist” to be defined in such a way that he explicitly isn’t one. Likewise, it would be a waste of time to insinuate that Mr. Does had inappropriate relations with his students in the middle of a debate about the word “inappropriate.”

If you and I can agree on a definition of the word, I’ll happily denounce or exonerate Mr. Raymond. Until then, I’ll use a made-up-phrase so there’s no misunderstanding: He strikes me as a man fixated on race. Do you disagree?

[gwern]

IIRC he was given a chunk of stock in a Linux IPO and while he lost most of its value in the dot-com crash, it still left him some spare change; add on consulting, royalties, the occasional job like being president, basic nerd frugal living, and you probably have the whole story.

[gonzo]

Shrinking book royalties and the earnings of his wife, who is a lawyer.

[_delirium]

I believe he was employed by the Open Source Initiative (which he co-founded) for some years, as its President. So indirectly funded by the companies that donated to OSI.

[hollerith]

Many years after found the Open Source Initiative, ESR stated publicly that he never made any money from it, and having read most of his writings from that period and a lot of commentary on the organization, I find that statement credible.

Also, he has claimed at least a couple of times over the years that he was (at the time of the claim) a consulting programmer.