You have an outside view of my writing, so I’m curious. On a scale of 0 = “But of course” to 5 = “Wow, that was out of left field”, how surprising did you find it that I would write this essay?
If you can find anything more specific to say along these lines (why it’s surprising/unsurprising) I would find that interesting.
I was slightly surprised, mostly because I had the expectation that if you’ve known about LW for a while, then I would have thought that you’d end up contributing either early or not at all. Curious what caused it to happen in 2021 in particular.
The way I have set this up for writers in the past has been to setup crossposting from an RSS feed under a tag (e.g. crossposting all posts tagged ‘lesswrong’).
I spent a minute trying and failed to figure out how to make an RSS feed from your blog under a single category. But if you have such an rss feed, and you make a category like ‘lesswrong’ then I’ll set up a simple crosspost, and hopefully save you a little time in expectation. This will work if you add the category old posts as well as new ones.
There’s a technical problem. My blog is currently frozen due to a stuck database server; I’m trying to rehost it. But I agree to your plan in principle and will discuss it with you when the blog is back up.
I recently learned of a free (donation-funded) service, siftrss.com, wherein you can take an RSS feed and do text-based filtering on any of its fields to produce a new RSS feed. (I’ve made a few feeds with it and it seems to work well.) I suspect you could filter based on the “category” field.
For me, probably 2. I read “How to become a hacker” several years ago and it shaped many of my career-related choices. The writing/reasoning style is very similar to the ratsphere, so I was not too surprised that I would also find you here.
0 or 1. I saw this post and thought “finally! I’ve been a fan since the early 90′s. I’m most surprised that it took you this long, and excited that you finally got around to it. :)
The ratsphere is ripe for some of the same treatment you gave the fossphere back in the day. (It’s under attack by forces of darkness; it’s adherents tend to be timid and poorly funded while its attackers are loud, charismatic, and throw a lot of money around; it revolves around a few centers of gravity (“projects”) that are fundamental building blocks of the future—the Big Problems; etc.)
I haven’t thought this through a ton, but if I squint a bit I can see Jaynes &etc filling the role of, like, Knuth and K&R and etc—hard engineering; and The Sequences/LW/SSC filling the role of, say, GNU and Lions and etc—a way for the masses to participate and contribute and absorb knowlege and gel into a tribe and a movement. I paint that vague hand-wavy picture for you, hoping you’ll understand when I say that this post feels like it should be expanded and become TAOUP but for the ratsphere.
I think the main reason some people have strong opinions about ESR is that he has some strong opinions, some of which are highly controversial, and he states some of those controversial opinions openly. In particular, much in US politics is super-divisive, and in five minutes on Eric’s blog you can readily find five things that some (otherwise?) reasonable people will get very angry about.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying anything about whether it is right or reasonable to get angry about any or all of those things. Only that, given their existence, it should not be a surprise that some people have strong feelings. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think arguments about Eric’s opinions about guns or communism or whatever have any place here on LW and I hope everyone will completely ignore those opinions when reading the present article.
(There are probably also people who have strong opinions about his strong opinions on, say, the things sometimes called “free software” and “open source software”, or about the quality of the software he’s written, or other things in that general vicinity. But I don’t think those are what people who get angry about ESR mostly get angry about.)
[EDITED to add:] Well, as I warned, “error is always possible”, and indeed one of my paraphrases makes what Eric wrote sound more inflammatory than what he actually wrote was. My apologies for that. Specifically: I said he said “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will”. He actually said specifically “rioters”. As it happens, someone in the ensuing discussion asked him to clarify the distinction, and this is what he said: “A protester holds up a sign and yells a slogan. A rioter intends to commit crime against persons or property, and expresses that intent in behavior; e.g. persons equipped with incendiaries or street weapons are rioters, not protesters.” So, not literally all white people at BLM protests, but any white person who “intends to commit crime against persons or property”, which may be judged e.g. by what the person is equipped with rather than by actions already committed.
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like “wait, this doesn’t seem OK”.
I am not very familiar with ESR’s opinions, but your summary of “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will” is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;”, with the key difference being “white rioters” instead of “white people”. While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it’s reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Yeah, “rioters” would have been more accurate than “people”, though I don’t know exactly what Eric considers the boundary between protesting and rioting. My apologies. As I said, mistakes get made when doing things quickly, and doing it quickly was much of the point.
[EDITED to add:] I have edited my original comment to point out the mistake; I also found a comment from Eric on the original blogpost that clarifies where he draws the line between “rioters” and mere protestors, and have quoted that there too.
Looking at voting patterns in this subthread, I have the impression that readers generally have the impression that I’m attempting to mount some sort of attack on Eric. Obviously I can’t prove anything about my intentions here, but I promise that that was not in any way my purpose; I was answering Zian’s puzzlement about how ESR could possibly be controversial by pointing out some controversial things. I don’t think Eric would disagree with my identification of those things as things some people might get angry about.
If my purpose had been an unscrupulous political attack, I wouldn’t have provided links to let everyone check whether my brief summaries were accurate, and I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to point out that I might have made errors and explain why they were particularly likely in this instance.
(I don’t object to being downvoted; if you think something I write is of low quality then you should downvote it. But it looks to me as if some wrong assumptions may be being made about my motives here.)
[EDITED to add:] Things look more “normal” now; dunno whether that means that the earlier state was some sort of statistical anomaly, or that some people read the above and agreed, or what. I mention this just in case anyone’s reading this and wonders why in this comment I’m expressing concern about something that’s not there :-).
I would expect the bar to be pretty clear and as habryka said “intent to commit crimes against persons or property”. I would expect Eric to have the bar somewhere where he thinks that the law that allows private citizens to use force to prevent crimes from happening would protect him.
As you’ll see from the edit to my original comment, I found something Eric said in the discussion on his blog that drew a fairly explicit boundary between rioters and mere protestors. My impression is that if Eric actually acts strictly according to the principles stated there, the law will not protect him and he will end up in jail (thinking that someone has intent to commit crimes is not generally sufficient justification in law for shooting them); several commenters on his blog expressed the same concern.
I worry that we may be getting into arguing about Eric’s opinions themselves, rather than merely answering the question “why do some people have such strong opinions about him”, and I think that’s not a useful topic for discussion here. Of course that’s mostly my fault for not getting my summaries perfectly accurate, for which once again I apologize.
For me, like 1 maybe 2? (That you would write it; it’s a little more surprising that you did.) I knew you’d read at least some of the sequences because I think I first found them through you, and I think you’ve called yourself a “fellow traveler”. Oh, and I remember you liked HPMOR. But I didn’t know if you were particularly aware of the community here.
Hmm, maybe a 2. I didn’t know you had read the Sequences, but it seems like the sort of thing that would appeal to you based on the writing in Dancing, etc.
For me the main surprise was to think “Eric Raymond. Huh. Just like the CatB author. Wait—really?! Here?” after which was an “of course! Now it all makes sense!”.
I’d previously noticed the similarities between the hacker ethos and rationality, to a large extent because they were what were attractive to me in the first place. The GS part was new info for me, but both the SF and Zen influences are obvious (though it’s nice to see it so explicitly explained). It feels like, in a certain sense, the hacker ethos is a special case of rationality. Hackers seemed from the outside to be these mystical creatures that used logic and intuition to get closer to a better understanding of computer systems in order to get them to do interesting things. With a focus on clarity, elegance, practicality etc. My understanding of a beisutsukai is someone who does just that, but in all matters, not just computery things. So rationality is a natural extension of being a hacker. Ditto with the mystical aspects which you mentioned earlier. I get the impression that both your writing and the Sequences have the same feel to them, for lack of a better expression.
p.s. - I’d like to thank you for the hacker howto. The “formative” in the earlier comment is spot on. Apart from the general hacker stuff, I also started to learn LISP. For which I’m eternally grateful.
You have an outside view of my writing, so I’m curious. On a scale of 0 = “But of course” to 5 = “Wow, that was out of left field”, how surprising did you find it that I would write this essay?
If you can find anything more specific to say along these lines (why it’s surprising/unsurprising) I would find that interesting.
I was slightly surprised, mostly because I had the expectation that if you’ve known about LW for a while, then I would have thought that you’d end up contributing either early or not at all. Curious what caused it to happen in 2021 in particular.
I don’t really have an interesting answer, I’m afraid. Busy life, lots of other things to pay attention to, never got around to it before.
Now that I’ve got the idea, I may re-post some rationality-adjacent stuff from my personal blog here so the LW crowd can know it exists.
The way I have set this up for writers in the past has been to setup crossposting from an RSS feed under a tag (e.g. crossposting all posts tagged ‘lesswrong’).
I spent a minute trying and failed to figure out how to make an RSS feed from your blog under a single category. But if you have such an rss feed, and you make a category like ‘lesswrong’ then I’ll set up a simple crosspost, and hopefully save you a little time in expectation. This will work if you add the category old posts as well as new ones.
There’s a technical problem. My blog is currently frozen due to a stuck database server; I’m trying to rehost it. But I agree to your plan in principle and will discuss it with you when the blog is back up.
Sounds good.
I recently learned of a free (donation-funded) service, siftrss.com, wherein you can take an RSS feed and do text-based filtering on any of its fields to produce a new RSS feed. (I’ve made a few feeds with it and it seems to work well.) I suspect you could filter based on the “category” field.
Please do.
5 for me. I read Dancing with Gods a long time ago and it’s very memorable. But had no idea about anything else.
For me, probably 2. I read “How to become a hacker” several years ago and it shaped many of my career-related choices. The writing/reasoning style is very similar to the ratsphere, so I was not too surprised that I would also find you here.
0 or 1. I saw this post and thought “finally! I’ve been a fan since the early 90′s. I’m most surprised that it took you this long, and excited that you finally got around to it. :)
The ratsphere is ripe for some of the same treatment you gave the fossphere back in the day. (It’s under attack by forces of darkness; it’s adherents tend to be timid and poorly funded while its attackers are loud, charismatic, and throw a lot of money around; it revolves around a few centers of gravity (“projects”) that are fundamental building blocks of the future—the Big Problems; etc.)
I haven’t thought this through a ton, but if I squint a bit I can see Jaynes &etc filling the role of, like, Knuth and K&R and etc—hard engineering; and The Sequences/LW/SSC filling the role of, say, GNU and Lions and etc—a way for the masses to participate and contribute and absorb knowlege and gel into a tribe and a movement. I paint that vague hand-wavy picture for you, hoping you’ll understand when I say that this post feels like it should be expanded and become TAOUP but for the ratsphere.
3
My knowledge before reading the article and comments could be summarized as :
These are some really great articles by ESR. I wonder why no one had taken them super seriously yet...
somewhat of an outsider perspective as FeepingCreature described
I wonder why some people have such strong opinions about this person
I think the main reason some people have strong opinions about ESR is that he has some strong opinions, some of which are highly controversial, and he states some of those controversial opinions openly. In particular, much in US politics is super-divisive, and in five minutes on Eric’s blog you can readily find five things that some (otherwise?) reasonable people will get very angry about.
… I thought I should actually test that, so I went over to have a look. His blog has been a bit less political lately than at some other times. But in exactly five minutes I found the following assertions (all the following are my paraphrases; I have no intent to distort but error is always possible, especially when reading quickly, so if you are minded to be angry at Eric you should first go and check what he actually wrote): the US has a problem with Communist oppression, Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero, white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will [EDITED to add: as habryka points out in a reply, this paraphrase is potentially misleading; more below], an armed storming of the Michigan State House was an appropriate response to stay-at-home orders. (That’s April 2020, not the thing a few months later where they tried to kidnap the Governor.) Plus this ceremony for gun users, which doesn’t make any particular assertions but I bet some people will find enraging.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying anything about whether it is right or reasonable to get angry about any or all of those things. Only that, given their existence, it should not be a surprise that some people have strong feelings. Also for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think arguments about Eric’s opinions about guns or communism or whatever have any place here on LW and I hope everyone will completely ignore those opinions when reading the present article.
(There are probably also people who have strong opinions about his strong opinions on, say, the things sometimes called “free software” and “open source software”, or about the quality of the software he’s written, or other things in that general vicinity. But I don’t think those are what people who get angry about ESR mostly get angry about.)
[EDITED to add:] Well, as I warned, “error is always possible”, and indeed one of my paraphrases makes what Eric wrote sound more inflammatory than what he actually wrote was. My apologies for that. Specifically: I said he said “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will”. He actually said specifically “rioters”. As it happens, someone in the ensuing discussion asked him to clarify the distinction, and this is what he said: “A protester holds up a sign and yells a slogan. A rioter intends to commit crime against persons or property, and expresses that intent in behavior; e.g. persons equipped with incendiaries or street weapons are rioters, not protesters.” So, not literally all white people at BLM protests, but any white person who “intends to commit crime against persons or property”, which may be judged e.g. by what the person is equipped with rather than by actions already committed.
Woah, at least one of those summaries seems really quite inaccurate. Bad enough that like, I feel like I should step in as a moderator and be like “wait, this doesn’t seem OK”.
I am not very familiar with ESR’s opinions, but your summary of “white people at BLM protests should be assumed to be communists and shot at will” is really misrepresenting the thing he actually said. What he actually said was “White rioters, on the other hand, will be presumed to be Antifa Communists attempting to manipulate this tragedy for Communist political ends;”, with the key difference being “white rioters” instead of “white people”. While there is still plenty to criticize in that sentence, this seems like a really crucial distinction that makes that sentence drastically less bad.
Topics like this tend to get really politicized and emotional, which I think means it’s reasonable to apply some extra scrutiny and care to not misrepresent what other people said, and generally err on the side of quoting verbatim (ideally while giving substantial additional context).
Yeah, “rioters” would have been more accurate than “people”, though I don’t know exactly what Eric considers the boundary between protesting and rioting. My apologies. As I said, mistakes get made when doing things quickly, and doing it quickly was much of the point.
[EDITED to add:] I have edited my original comment to point out the mistake; I also found a comment from Eric on the original blogpost that clarifies where he draws the line between “rioters” and mere protestors, and have quoted that there too.
Looking at voting patterns in this subthread, I have the impression that readers generally have the impression that I’m attempting to mount some sort of attack on Eric. Obviously I can’t prove anything about my intentions here, but I promise that that was not in any way my purpose; I was answering Zian’s puzzlement about how ESR could possibly be controversial by pointing out some controversial things. I don’t think Eric would disagree with my identification of those things as things some people might get angry about.
If my purpose had been an unscrupulous political attack, I wouldn’t have provided links to let everyone check whether my brief summaries were accurate, and I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to point out that I might have made errors and explain why they were particularly likely in this instance.
(I don’t object to being downvoted; if you think something I write is of low quality then you should downvote it. But it looks to me as if some wrong assumptions may be being made about my motives here.)
[EDITED to add:] Things look more “normal” now; dunno whether that means that the earlier state was some sort of statistical anomaly, or that some people read the above and agreed, or what. I mention this just in case anyone’s reading this and wonders why in this comment I’m expressing concern about something that’s not there :-).
I would expect the bar to be pretty clear and as habryka said “intent to commit crimes against persons or property”. I would expect Eric to have the bar somewhere where he thinks that the law that allows private citizens to use force to prevent crimes from happening would protect him.
As you’ll see from the edit to my original comment, I found something Eric said in the discussion on his blog that drew a fairly explicit boundary between rioters and mere protestors. My impression is that if Eric actually acts strictly according to the principles stated there, the law will not protect him and he will end up in jail (thinking that someone has intent to commit crimes is not generally sufficient justification in law for shooting them); several commenters on his blog expressed the same concern.
I worry that we may be getting into arguing about Eric’s opinions themselves, rather than merely answering the question “why do some people have such strong opinions about him”, and I think that’s not a useful topic for discussion here. Of course that’s mostly my fault for not getting my summaries perfectly accurate, for which once again I apologize.
For me, like 1 maybe 2? (That you would write it; it’s a little more surprising that you did.) I knew you’d read at least some of the sequences because I think I first found them through you, and I think you’ve called yourself a “fellow traveler”. Oh, and I remember you liked HPMOR. But I didn’t know if you were particularly aware of the community here.
Hmm, maybe a 2. I didn’t know you had read the Sequences, but it seems like the sort of thing that would appeal to you based on the writing in Dancing, etc.
For me the main surprise was to think “Eric Raymond. Huh. Just like the CatB author. Wait—really?! Here?” after which was an “of course! Now it all makes sense!”.
I’d previously noticed the similarities between the hacker ethos and rationality, to a large extent because they were what were attractive to me in the first place. The GS part was new info for me, but both the SF and Zen influences are obvious (though it’s nice to see it so explicitly explained). It feels like, in a certain sense, the hacker ethos is a special case of rationality. Hackers seemed from the outside to be these mystical creatures that used logic and intuition to get closer to a better understanding of computer systems in order to get them to do interesting things. With a focus on clarity, elegance, practicality etc. My understanding of a beisutsukai is someone who does just that, but in all matters, not just computery things. So rationality is a natural extension of being a hacker. Ditto with the mystical aspects which you mentioned earlier. I get the impression that both your writing and the Sequences have the same feel to them, for lack of a better expression.
p.s. - I’d like to thank you for the hacker howto. The “formative” in the earlier comment is spot on. Apart from the general hacker stuff, I also started to learn LISP. For which I’m eternally grateful.