I have a black friend who recently got a new boss, was forced to do months of intensive training training to "keep up". He ultimately ended up leaving the company despite being one of their most productive engineers.
It this sort of regressive opinion that keeps perpetuating the stereo type and forcing people out of jobs. Judge people based on what they are doing not what color their skin is.
Let's say I have two candidates, one is asian and the other is black, and on paper they both look great. They both attended Harvard, and they both interviewed well.
Now if I know that the average SAT score required for Asians to be admitted to Harvard is 1580, and the average SAT score required for Blacks to be admitted to Harvard is 1360, and all other metrics (GPA, conscientiousness, work habits, etc) fall along similar lines of differing standards, then I would have a statistical bias toward selecting the Asian candidate. Not because I'm racist, but because DEI and other equity efforts at Harvard have pre-biased the candidate pool for me.
In the absence of equity efforts, "I went to Harvard" would be a metric that stands on its own, independent of race. But with DEI, it is not. We have eliminated the "I hate them damn blacks" style of racism and replaced it with a more insidious "In order to make a statistically correct decision, I need to be biased against Blacks" style of racism. I'm not sure this is an improvement.
This is an example from college admissions, but the same analogy can be drawn in any environment with strong DEI influence.
Either way, people using stallman as an antidiversity advocate makes me belly laugh. The guy is on video eating skin off his goddam toes while lecturing CS. If that dude or any of his followers are antidiversity, they need to look themself in the mirror. Public foot autocannabilism is well beyond eccentric and if diversity movements or mindsets didn't exist the guy would be jobless
people pointing out that what the man said and did was fucked is somehow a character assassination attempt?
Literally none of the factual claims of “RMS said X” have been false, it’s pretty much all been on the record.
On the contrary, literally every single claim about what RMS said or did was fabricated, or pulled out of context so badly you could still see the severed threads trailing behind. The original posts and subsequent press articles were one big patchwork of lies and manipulative statements; this was all trivial to verify and apparent to anyone except those who, for some reason, really wanted to believe it's true.
Look, if you take any public figure, and spend enough time looking through all the things they ever written or said in their lives, you can probably find some terrible thing to paint them as a terrible person. Someone could be a role model, have a lifetime of charitable work and positive achievements, bbbbbbut years ago they once said they didn't like gay people (or whatever), all of a sudden none of their achievements matter and they're actually monsters!
Any of us with a long posting history on the Internet probably at one time said something that wasn't nice. Cherry picking that one thing and holding it up as the summation of who we are, is character assassination.
I also remember him being called a creep because he used to sleep in his office.
And at no point was any kind of change of opinion and/or public apology even hinted at.
It didn't feel like an honest attempt at all.
This is especially important, as time moves forward and people who never even met RMS read about this, to make sure we are relying on contemporary reports and not just fading memories.
You're defending the indefensible - why?
0 - https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai... (with links to primary sources throughout).
That’s certainly the one I remember, and everything else was just people piling on to try and provide more ammo or more legitimacy to that claim because “look he’s a creep in other ways too!”.
But the claim that he defended pedophilia is itself false. The lady making the claim quoted him as saying one thing and then immediately criticised the quote as if it said another thing. I don’t remember the details now, but I remember reading the original open letter at the time and being baffled by how that was considered as evidence against RMS.
Im not saying he’s not a weirdo or creep, I don’t know if he is or not, just that the accusations against him about his comments on minsky’s visit of epstein’s island were strawnan accusations.
rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
They weren't. The things he actually said played a minor role in that kerfuffle - it all started with a lot of smears thrown at RMS by a person with some grudge. Additional quotes came later, as people started fishing for them.
> rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).
Why exactly are you defending people being irrational or engaging in power plays? You note yourself what the facts were, so why justify mistaking them?
> This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.
RMS was doing fine until someone decided to destroy him for personal gain. Do you expect every person doing something interesting in a niche community should behave like a Hollywood celebrity or a politician, having their communications managed by teams of spindoctors, on the off chance someone wants to destroy them and picks mass media as their weapon of choice?
He was not destroyed, literally or figuratively. If that is the basis of your claim, then everything else based upon that has no supporting evidence.
Who do you assert yielded personal gain, and how? I saw nothing of the sort.
He's bad at communicating. It may be because he's autistic, but ultimately that part is not relevant.
The way humans in bulk receive public communications is a fact of nature; it would be like someone swimming in the ocean and drowning and saying that it was bad that the ocean couldn't accept their style of swimming.
He's a public figure and certain actions undertaken by public figures when communicating with millions of people are bad. He undertook those actions and suffered the negative consequences. It's ultimately not related to his neurodivergence; there are autistic people who don't make huge PR blunders.
That's what happens when you put all your eggs into one basket, and then realize that basket had a hole. Maybe free software would be better off if the FSF had spent time building a resilient movement rather than a church to RMS.
He is a white male who’s in power despite eating toe gunk, while also supporting an environment hostile to woman. He’s in no way a good representation of diversity simply because he’s odd.
For what exactly ? There are countless examples of compagny who innovated or succedded well while everyone being the same race / gender (cf microsoft / apple in the 1990s or literally any china compagny right now).
I do enjoy diversity at work because I don't like when all my peers look / think / speak the same, but it's not exactly "important" beside my personal enjoyment
My point is Its a huge unproven assumption that diversity would have magically solved that problem.
The problem is that there will always be biases in hiring, "meritocracy" is a myth. It has been shown numerous times (e.g. [1]) that there is a significant bias towards men even if male and female candidates are equal, with the most decisive bias being an assumption that women may not be willing/able to work longer hours.
Besides, meritocracy is fraught with other issues as well, see e.g. [2][3][4] for more detailed writeups than I could possibly write here in a HN comment.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912432221137...
[2] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-meritocracy-worse...
[3] https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is...
Inclusivity is grift by definition. It is hiring for characteristics other than merit. Note this doesn't mean characteristics can't be meritous; if your business has a demographic, you better involve that demo. A 100% male company isn't going to invent the best tampon.
If you're concerned about bias in hiring, then eliminate bias. Do blind interviews and redact resumes, broaden your candidate sources. You don't eliminate bias by... introducing bias.
The "problem" is that when this purist meritocratic approach has been tried, it results in more white men being hired, not less. Therefore such approaches are swiftly cancelled, in favour of introducing deliberate bias on the basis of superficial characteristics. See here as a good example: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
What an ignorant and bigoted thing to say. Next your gonna say the same thing about Asians.
Meritocracy is blind to race and focuses solely on aptitude. The fact you don't like the outcome says more about you than about meritocracy.
I mean… a man did invent tampons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earle_Haas
Granted there were previous, less good, versions
...As opposed to what happened before, where every single person hired was amazing and never the nephew of some boardmember.
I'm starting to think there's more harm than good with these inclusivity movements. It creates two categories of students (and grads) when looking at hiring: people you know are there on merit and people who maybe got a little bit of help from "the quota".
I've heard it (in engineering only meetings) "you know this guy is solid, he went to X and he's Asian so you know he's there for the right reasons". And the thing is, you can't really argue with that logic.
Something I have to wonder is are women and minorities... ok with this?
Honestly it sounds more like a problem with your job's hiring process than with diversity movements. Even if you restrict your pool of candidates to a minority, if that minority is large enough, it's very likely someone from that community is capable of filling the role.
If you really don't care about the background then you can ally yourself with someone who does and get someone who both increases diversity and is competent at their job.
> The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
That's not specific to diversity. Dick measurement contests have existed forever. It's a myth that the past was more meritocratic that now. The proof is actually that if it were then the high ranks would be a lot more diverse than they are now. At least if you accept the premise that background is not related to capability (ie you are not racist/misogynic).
The issue around unfettered inclusivity is that it enables grifters to gain positions of power based purely on superficial elements that they possess.
The original meaning of diversity was "diversity of thought" -- it has been co-opted to mean something totally different.