It's not with autism, but I have first hand experience telling a mentally ill person (diagnosis was schizoaffective) that certain behavior is creepy and made women uncomfortable. They didn't listen. They argued it with me very intensely instead. In some cases part of the illness is not realizing there's a problem. It's not always going to work to politely flag a behavior as off putting and they get it right away.
And when you put such person in position where women have choice between leaving and being undermined by his behavior or being insulted or have to work around potential danger to reputation etc or what it is that he was doing, you are in fact disadvantaging women in that organization. You dont get to claim there is no sexism here nor claim that it is all meritocracy nor fair nor babble about natural self selection.
It makes not just women leave, it makes men who dont care about being members of such culture to leave.
For the record, a person that mistreats males would be same case.
In the case of this person I am referring to, it's been rather self-selecting and he's not in any positions of authority. It's pretty different from Stallman's purported autism-spectrum behavior too.
But it's also important to note that with the right medications, people like the case I'm describing can do better. So I'd like to afford that, while we agree that people don't make great leaders, authorities, communicators in that state or condition, they don't necessarily get there by being bad or totally irredeemable people, help is available to them and we should hope that they find it and stay "on the wagon", to use a metaphor from somewhere else.
I agree with that and I did worked with people who are on the spectrum.
My pet peeve in these discussion is the argument that boils down to "he is autistic therefore everyone else should bend over and take whatever abuse that person unleashes on them and be understanding back". This argument is present up thread.
That does not work and just makes situation worst for everyone.
But if you've ever argued with a delusional person, they don't give up their beliefs easily. Frequently what happens is they'll turn it on you. So if I say, "you're making those women uncomfortable", he'll argue and say there is a problem with me, that I am too prudish or jealous of his romantic success. And they get very angry and obsessive about being confronted.
I don't know what it'd be like for 20 or 50 people to question these beliefs, but 10 definitely won't convince him. And with the nature of this complaint, a lot of time people are either too polite or too scared to tell him. It seems to me though, the best way to get it to sink in for him is an atypical antipsychotic.
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I think the most interesting part of this gotterdamerung is the claim in “Remove Stallman appendix A” that if the work of a Great Genius hinders The work of some number of talented skilled folk, then society is ultimately at a loss. I’m not certain that this is necessarily true. Or false for that matter. I have an intuition, possibly colored by an overall culture of hero worship, that it is false.
This is the rationale: the dynamics large groups of people inevitably approaches that of a committee. Committees are averaging devices that smooth potentially groundbreaking ideas out of serious consideration. Genius on the other hand is not only extraordinarily capable of such groundbreaking ideas but is able to insist on them doggedly.
OTOH it means that one true genius (and maybe Stallman isn’t one, but true geniuses have very very often been assholes) is worth almost an infinite number of merely talented folk.
The ultimate question: what lifted us from mere animal status 10-15K years ago? A handful of geniuses or a general society awakening?
But also; how may “young talented physicists” it takes to change a lightbulb?
There's no reason to suppose this. Even accepting your logic, the people he discouraged from CS might have wound up being highly effective solo contributors or worked in small teams.
Stallman never chased away anybody from CSAIL