Meredith L. Patterson

Something that I think most folks in this thread are missing, that's hugely important to what actually happened here:

This was not an isolated incident.

If it were, I'd look at his comments and write it off as his usual tendency to jump on a minor point and derail a conversation with some totally pedantic technicallity, and I do think the thing he actually said in this case has been wildly mis-interpreted and overstated in many places (the bits about him defending Epstein are clearly untrue, and even the author of the blog post that went viral and set off the shitstorm has said so, and sent corrections to the publications she'd spoken to directly).

I even agree with his statement that, from a moral standpoint 17 vs. 18 isn't really that important -- we set arbitrary cutoffs for age of consent and it's not like there's a legal determination to be made re: Minsky anyway: he's dead.

So from that mailing list thread alone, it reads like a typical autism-spectrum dude missing the social context, making a pedantic point that people read too much into and take the wrong way, and getting himself in trouble. And this is an angle that would naturally draw my own sympathies toward him.

But Stallman is on-record as saying he thinks there's such a thing as "consentual pedophila", and given that context, I think folks can be forgiven for reading into his current statements.

Ultimately though, the bigger issue isn't even about anything that happened in the past few days. RMS has been…

Reddit and Redditors, as with HN and its participants, are diverse and contain multitudes.

I moderate a couple of modest subs and have participated on Reddit, generally positively, for three years. Pao hadn't impressed me hugely, though I didn't find her behavior strongly negative. The FPH situation was handled and communicated poorly, but from what I understand, was sound (the banning was based on violations of site rules, not specific expressed opinions).

Pao's personal legal issues have certainly been a distraction, and while I've not obsessed over the case and related issues, she, and her husband, seem to have an interesting history and set of problems.

The blow-up over Taylor was different: it concerned directly trust between Reddit and a small number of very crucial moderators -- /r/IAMA's mod team is 23 users, but the are the gatekeepers to one of Reddit's most valuable features (not one I use much myself, FWIW). The specific roster of complaints from IAMA and other subs affected were on point and material.

The response from the larger Reddit community has varied: some was legit, some expressions of outrage over real or imagined past offenses.

My own views of Pao took a sharp downward note at that point. David Frum and Asher Wolf, neither of whom are pimply-faced teenage boys, both make great observations:

https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/616834072015339520
"Reddit's users are their product. Reddit is currently discovering
where the balance of power lies…

"Furthermore, I'd like to +1 the idea of sanctioning
individuals who feel the need to contribute
disruptive/harmful comments to this thread."

I'm all in favor for squelching users that are intentionally disruptive/harmful, but the users at whom that comment was directed did not do anything worth being sanctioned. Honestly, the NodeJS community has completely jumped the shark.

This reminds me of this SMBC cartoon about the difference between "offended" and "offensive".

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2164

Some of the examples don't even make sense:
- mount is not an exclusively sexual term. For example, "a jockey mounts a horse"
- the origin of the finger protocol comes from the idea of "snitching" on someone and has absolutely nothing to do with sex.
- the touch command updates mtime (or creates a file if it doesn't exist) and its origin is from "touching something last"

The most ironic thing in all this is that the causes are being championed by people who are very clearly neurotypical and completely ignorant to the cognitive diversity that has pretty much always existed in the field of computing that includes individuals who either don't feel offense or are oblivious to what might offend. Honestly, the NodeJS is becoming a less safe space for people on the aspie/autistic end of spectrum, lest they be attacked by a mob of people who wants to sanction them for word choices that they are insensitive to (i.e. completely…

This kind of stereotyping is an inevitable result of the worlds of "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" colliding in the workplace. There were no cool nerds in high school. Instead of working out or partying, we played games or fiddled with computers in sullen, slightly embarrassed solitude or with a cadre of other misfit rejects. The idea of someone writing code after a morning of pumping iron is strange and threatening to someone who's been marginalized or just excluded by the cool kids all of their life.

I like this article:

https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c#.4siaw43pe

> the process of unlearning lessons ingrained from childhood takes a lot more than a cap and gown or even a $10 million VC check

Shedding these prejudices is just part of growing up, and a lot of engineers are awfully young.

And if you have an eighty gallon drum of protein by your desk, it's probably worth reading pg's essay on high school to get some insight into where the hostility is coming from:

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

If you look at this author's medium page, she has another post on exactly that.

https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

My favorite bit:

The mainstream tech industry offers us money, status, and a stable (if weak) position in its idealised social hierarchy. The voices clamouring for change offer us no money, a social role reversal back to “disempowered outsider,” and a status demotion to “likely sexual predator.” (The polite euphemism for this is “creepy,” a pejorative applied indiscriminately both to those who actively transgress other people’s boundaries and to those with the unmitigated gall to be attracted to someone else while being funny-looking.) Given a choice between these two, which would you side with? It’s true that the one is confining, essentialist, and a far cry from the best of all possible worlds, but the other is all these things and a step backward for people who finally got to take a step forward for once when the internet took off.

From another article of hers, [when nerds collide](https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c)

>[ ... ] much of the backlash from weird nerds against “brogrammers” and “geek feminists” alike. (If you thought the conflict was only between those two groups, or that someone who criticises one group must necessarily be a member of the other, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention.) Both groups are latecomers barging in on a cultural space that was once a respite for us, and we don’t appreciate either group bringing its cultural conflicts into our space in a way that demands we choose one side or the other. That’s a false dichotomy, and false dichotomies make us want to tear our hair out.

Also, I'm not sure I'm seeing the "predictable comments" that you are.