[TeMPOraL]

None of these seem even remotely relevant to engineering. Moreover, research, discovery and innovation requires letting people having freedom to think. That includes holding unpopular, controversial or politically incorrect opinions.

We are so worried about Evil Government dictating what we can and cannot think that we haven't noticed the current organic trend to prosecute every other person for thoughtcrimes. It's not the jackboot that keeps us on the ground, it's social media, and the public outrage you get when you disagree with whatever's the most popular opinion on a topic this week.

[dredmorbius]

ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so.

That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard frames which no longer fit.

My own work and research of the past several years puts a very high significance on both frames (or more generally, models), and on the psychology of interacting with those, with strong emphasis on denial in various forms.

ESR's political views call much of his work into question. I say that as someone who was strongly influenced by much of what he said, and enjoyed a fair bit of it. He's become a tremendous disappointment.

TAOUP has its merits. It's rather like recommending Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto a a social-technological critique. It's got some really solid points (see what Bill Joy's had to say on it: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html). But damned if the rest of the author's views and actions don't muddy the waters a tad.

[twoodfin]

ESR's views particularly on guns, libertarian economics and politics, and AGW, all present pretty standard cases of assuming a frame and fitting all data to that frame. Chopping, discarding, and/or fabricating data as necessary to do so.

That actually directly calls into question engineering validity, as solid engineering is solidly based in reality and a realistic interpretation of facts. Also the ability to discard frames which no longer fit.

"Engineering validity"? This is just a dressed up ad hominem. If some technical argument ESR has made is inconsistent or doesn't match up with empirical evidence, criticize away, but his positions on what exactly the Second Amendment means or what the best role of government is can't possibly inform that criticism. It could, perhaps, explain why he's made an error, but it can't identify the error for us.

ESR's political views call much of his work into question.

Which questions about what work? If you're going to cast aspersions like this, you'd probably best be specific.

[peteretep]

    > This is just a dressed up ad hominem

No, it's explicitly and purposefully ad-hominem, suggesting that a person's lack of judgement in one area leads to questions about his judgement in a related one.

[dredmorbius]

Actually, it's not ad hominem at all.

Ad homimen would be "people named Eric cannot be trusted".

This is calling into question ESR's general credibility, based on his record. That's a character judgement.

I'm also not saying ESR is wrong in all things -- a consistently wrong indicator is useful (read the opposite of what it says). An inconsistently wrong one is maddening: you've got to pay close attention to what its doing and determine the pattern to its errors. That's the taxing part.

[peteretep]

Ad hominem is where you discount an argument based on the person making it. I'm not sure where the name thing is meant to come in to it.

[dredmorbius]

I suppose the fallacy is where the attributes are irrelevant to the argument.

There's a somewhat related comment I'd seen recently which I've found useful:

Nota bene: a fallacious ad hominem only occurs when an accusation against the person serves as a premise to the conclusion. An attack upon that person as a further conclusion isn't fallacious and may, in fact, be morally mandatory.

https://plus.google.com/+StevenFlaeck/posts/EP88WvFohWr

That's not quite what I'm doing here: I'm leveraging the attack on credibility to discount further statements from ESR. But for numerous reasons of psychology and general reputation, if not a strict formal logic sense, there's a strong rationale to this.

Or: the narrator has been shown unreliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility

Traditionally, modern, credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise, which both have objective and subjective components. Trustworthiness is based more on subjective factors, but can include objective measurements such as established reliability.

[twoodfin]

Many (most) people, including many highly respected scientists and engineers, are fully capable of displaying incredible judgment in their discipline yet awful judgment in other aspects of their lives. Should we put an asterisk on papers published by researchers in the middle of messy divorces?

[dredmorbius]

There are some flagrant examples. Peter Duesberg, the UC Berkely molecular biologist prof who thinks that the HIV/AIDS link is bogus, comes to mind.

There are also those who tend to know their limits and note when they're out of their depth or area(s) of expertise. So no, that's not a universal guide either.

[peteretep]

In the unlikely case you feel most science and engineering is a "related area" to family life, yes.

[dredmorbius]

...but his positions...

His making up shit (or buying in to others' made-up shit) to justify them does, as does his ignoring contradictory evidence and record..

Which questions about what work?

The problem is one of an unreliable narrator. If you cannot trust someone's judgement, and they spew crap, repeatedly, then the odds that they're blowing smoke elsewhere increase.

It's the same reason that lawyers seek to impugn witnesses or call into question credibility. Or, to pick another hobby horse of mine, there are news and media organizations which spew crap. Fox News gets a lot of much-deserved scorn for this, but they're not the only one. Bullshit in media (in the most general meaning of the word: any information delivery system) is something I've been paying a lot of attention to, and I'm rather sensitive to it.

Case in point recently involves a 123 year old quote I'd seen attributed to J. P. Morgan, the Gilded Age banker. It struck me as curious, and I dug into it. My conclusion: it's a hoax.

The item in question is referred to as the Banker's Manifesto of 1892, or as the Wall Street Manifesto. Almost certainly the fabrication of one Thomas Westlake Gilruth, lawyer, real estate agent, community activist, and some-time speaker and writer for People's Party causes in the 1890s and 1900s. (Pardon the digression: there is a point, it happens to be both fresh in my mind and sufficiently detached from contemporary affairs to be a fair foil.)

Among the evidence I turned up, several contemporaneous newspapermen who'd drawn the same conclusion. Mind that this was a time of highly partisan press, but these were editors of People's Party papers in various locales.

From The advocate and Topeka tribune. (Topeka, Kan.), 7 & 14 Sept. 1892:

The Great West and one or two other exchanges reproduce the Chicago Daily Press fake purporting to be a Wall street circular. The thing originated in the fertile brain of F. W. Gilmore [sic: should be T. W. Gilruth], who held a position for a time at the Press. He has been challenged time and again to produce the original if it is genuine, and has failed to do so. The thing is a fraud and so is its author, and neither of them is worthy of the confidence of the people.

The following week's issue corected the typo with a emphasis on why naming and shaming mattered:

We desire to make this correction lest there be somebody named Gilmore who might object to the charge, and because the fraud should be placed where it belongs. Gilruth is a snide, and if anyone who knows him has not yet found it out, he is liable to do so to his sorrow.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-07...

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85031982/1892-09-14...

From the Barbour County index., July 06, 1892, p. 1

If the genuineness of this dispatch cannot be established, it should be taken in at once. If reform writers put it alongside the Huscard and Buell circulars and various other documents of like character, the public faith in the genuineness of all may be shaken. We cannot afford to father any fakes.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015080/1892-07-06...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

(My own analysis turned up other internal inconsistencies within the documents as well, detailed at the reddit link above.)

Much as those late 19th century editors, a hueristic I've increasingly taken to applying is looking at what sources (publications, companies, politicians, authors, online commentators, monitoring systems) do and don't provide reliable information. There's also a distinction I draw between occasionally being wrong (errors happen), and systematic bias. As the Tribune and Index called out, Gilruth was being systematically misleading. And apparently intentionally.

My issue with ESR isn't that I know he's bullshitting on any one point or antoher, it's that I don't know when he is, and, as with other unreliable data streams, sussing out the truth is a lot of work for low reward. He's like an unreliable gauage or monitoring system that sends off false alerts when it shouldn't ,stays silent when it should alert, and highlights the wrong areas of trouble when it does manage to go off at the right time. You simply start to lose your faith in it.

ESR's problem is he believes his own bullshit.

I've decided I don't need that problem.

[twoodfin]

I can't help but notice you managed to write something approximating the length of a short essay without once pointing out any "bullshit" in ESR's technical writing, let alone explaining how said "bullshit" must derive from his wrongthink.

[dredmorbius]

I'm afraid I must apologize for failing to make myself clear: it's that his practices call into question his statements in other areas.

I have to confess that I don't have specific instances at hand, for two reasons. One is that much of his more technical writing on programming is outside my own area of expertise. The other is that, given his tendencies, I largely ignore him.

My point, however, wasn't where he is specifically mistaken, but why the traits he exhibits in his rantings on other topics do have a bearing on his engineering judgement.

I do hope that's clear now.

[Frondo]

I pasted this link elsewhere in the comments; the rationalwiki page talks about ESR's objectionable ideas:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.

[davidgerard]

I wrote a bit of that page, and I still listen avidly to his technical expertise, which is qualitatively greater than most people's. But the rest ...

[davidgerard]

I continue to take everything ESR says about technology seriously. His opinions on everything else ... are an instructive example in the non-transferable nature of expertise.

[pakled_engineer]

That's like saying DEKs belief in the supernatural calls into question TAOCP, totally irrelevant

[dredmorbius]

Sorry, but DEK?

[pakled_engineer]

Don E Knuth - The Art of Computer Programming

[philh]

> ESR's political views call much of his work into question.

Presumably this question, whatever it is, can be answered by looking at his work. Do you think ESR's technical work and technical writings fail to stand up to scrutiny?

[dredmorbius]

It definitely gives me pause. ESR clearly doesn't know when he's out of his depth (classic Dunning-Krueger).

I'm not enough of a programmer to judge his programming texts, though I am enough of a sysamdin to find his Unixy sysadminish stuff generally valid.

I've found CatB itself aging poorly and question a number of the assumptions behind it, particularly as concerns anthropology. It seems shaky. Though I think the general principles behind Free Software and the open source model have their merits. Just, possibly, not quite those ESR describes.

[peteretep]

ESR expressed views on all sorts of items which are unknowable and much debated; programmers cling to this idea that there's a right and a wrong (protobuffers not JSON! One True Way vs TMTOWTDI! Emacs vs Vi! JavaScript is a reasonable choice etc etc). Generally there's not, there are just ideas and opinions without hard data. Systemd contradicts pieces of the original article.

So you tell me: how would we know if his technical work stood up to scrutiny? If I have experience that agrees, does that mean it does? What if my experience contradicts IT?

[hawkice]

Indeed, this is the critical question. If L. Ron Hubbard secretly but accurately predicted the lottery numbers for last week, it doesn't mean we have to go back and change them. Things can seem wrong/impossible/against your worldview, but that sense doesn't help quite so much as _just looking_.

Fundamentally, calling things into question has little value until we generate an answer to the question it was called into. Considering it's relatively easy to judge him on the technical work, why not?

[phlakaton]

You say you distrust the author's views and opinions because of his politics.

I say: good! You should never take an author's work at face value. Every bit of nonfiction you read should be read critically. Nobody's judgment is infallible – not even Nobel prizewinners.

[dredmorbius]

No, not because of his politics, but because of (among other elements) his political argument methods.

If ESR would pose credible arguments and facts, exhibit critical thinking facility, not stoop to denigrating his counterparts, etc., I'd find his points of view more substantive.

But he does none of that, and, rather, the opposite.

I do seek out contradicting evidence, among my mantras (and a conspicuous posted note to myself) is "seek to disprove". I've changed my mind and/or views on a number of significant points and in some cases major views over the past few years. I do that based on evidence and argument, though. It's not a casual process, and doesn't happen easily.

But being able to admit I'm wrong is a large part of it. Also: not insisting on being wrong (valuing belief consistency with time over consistency with observed reality).

Questioning everything is, however, rather exhausting. Developing heuristics for when to start digging in to apparent bullshit claims helps a lot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...

[bcg1]

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

[KingMob]

It's disingenuous to equate huge numbers of people disagreeing with you on the internet to the government suppressing you with law or force.

ESR is free to speak his beliefs in public, and in return people are free to criticize him, not recommend his books, refuse to invite him to conferences, etc.

Freedom of speech is about prior restraint, not immunity from consequences.

[TeMPOraL]

Is it now? When you can get fired from your job over your private beliefs, when even a Nobel prize winner can have his (and her - completely innocent - wife's) career ended on the spot, when you can lose your home over disagreeing with "status quo", I say something is wrong.

Maybe this is how democratic - as opposed to totalitarian - oppression looks like. When you have to avoid discussions out of fear you'll get fired and blacklisted in the industry, this suddenly doesn't look so different than what refusal to government "truth" looked like several decades ago.

[davidgerard]

The libertarian alternative to discrimination laws is people boycotting those they find reprehensible.

(Of course, if it's a libertarian favourite being boycotted, the same libertarians reliably shit - c.f. Brendan Eich - but anyway.)

[marrs]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this

[rodgerd]

> None of these seem even remotely relevant to engineering.

Believing things that have no scientific merit in favour of things that have plenty of scientific evidence would be a huge concern in an engineer.

Given is (mostly memory-holed) mysogyny, racism, and homophobia that leads him to discard the views of people in a most un-meritocratic fashion and I think you have another concern.

[the_ancient]

You have the freedom to think........ what the hive mind whats you to think.