| We have zero data or evidence to differentiate between "He was pushed out for being right about the ethics complaint" and "he was pushed out because he was wrong about the ethics complaint and did not take that well" People are jumping to conclusions about who the aggrieved party is because they have a vague connection to the guy who made HowStuffWorks and zero connection to the counterparty. Especially on HN, people would rather believe that "the system is rigged against the brilliant individual" rather than "the individual can often be the problem". Just as often as upper management is corrupt, a single individual who had NO PRIOR EVIDENCE OF NEGATIVE INTERACTION WITH ANYONE goes absolutely apeshit and attempts to destroy your life. My mother is a well respected teacher. After about 4 years of working in a new school, one of the other teachers in her department seemingly got "triggered" and went utterly insane. He started fabricating ethics complaints, lying to administrators, and even went so far as to retain a lawyer to sue the school district to have her removed for his completely made up allegations. I read the complaint and I cannot believe a lawyer was willing to be paid to participate. It was pages of insane rantings, like manifesto level, full of misspellings and mistakes and made up entirely of outright lies. The internal investigation was terrifying, because it starts as "He said/She said". Luckily he was crazy enough to fill his allegations with things that were demonstrably disprovable with documentation, but without that, the school absolutely would have just let my mother go instead of fight it. There was no "cause", no change in department policy that favored my mother over him, no change in pecking order, nothing. He just one day decided to go to war with her. He completely lost his connection to reality. Yet to his students, he continued to teach normally, and nothing seemed off. We have no facts. We have no evidence. We likely never will. We should reserve judgement. |
Slightly off topic question, but is this Silicon-Randian projection really particularly widespread on HN by and large or only for specific subset of topics?