Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it is very likely to be the third. Just have a read of some of ESR's articles. Eg:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129

" American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. And it gets worse: the average IQ of African blacks is lower still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental retardation in the U.S. And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather than nurturance effects. "

ESR's famous melodramatic-response to having his CML2 ("Eric's configuration markup language for kernel building") patch rejected by Linus is also quite telling about his self-perception and his perception of other people and his interaction with anyone who would have an opposing viewpoint to his.

View on HN

ESR's politics are repugnant, but there's more than enough evidence of job-related narcissism to make an argument about his personality (if that's needed) without having to drag the thread through his profuse bigotry. That's what Twitter's for.

I'm not sure how much more needs to be said beyond the fact that ESR has repeatedly claimed, including recently, that the Internet might fail if people don't continue to donate to his Patreon --- a Patreon which, he has previously stated, stands as direct evidence of his fame as a programmer, a fame rivaling that of Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds.

How does the quote show that he "brings the drama"? I mean, that's on his own blog. It's not like he's exporting that. It's not like he's going up to black people and saying "you're almost retarded."

I think the CML incident and the time where he yelled at some Debian developer about "our tribe" are better examples, because at least there he's going into other people's spaces and actually confronting them.

Because what good can come from discussing that topic? The only reasons to broach it are to a.) troll and/or b.) agitate for some horrific policy proposals.

He's not an academic researcher. Don't you think it's odd for some old white guy to get worked up over minority test scores? Why write about this rather than basically anything else? Either he's a troll or profoundly unaware about how bringing this line of argument up may make people feel threatened. There are a lot of things that simply don't need to be discussed. It's like graphically describing your partner's episiotomy over dinner. Some things just inspire a visceral reaction.

It's odd, sure, but it's his blog. People blog about whatever they're interested in. He could have all kinds of reasons for being interested in that which aren't trolling or policy.

Here's an unflattering guess why he might be interested in this: he has cerebal palsy. Despite that, he still is a fairly smart (even if crazy and/or racist) guy. He might be extremely interested in differences in human intelligence for that reason. To figure out why he still has above average intelligence while most other people with his birth defect don't. That could explain a lot of his crazy beliefs and his narcissistic "I'm a super unix hacker" routine.

Why does he have to be an "academic researcher" to have opinions about race that he wants to talk about on his blog? Or for that matter, any topic? Do you have an anthropology degree to assert your opinion that his blog may make people feel threatened, or are you just another guy on the internet with an opinion?

>Why write about this rather than basically anything else?

Why not? If it's true, and you offered absolutely no refutation to his claim whatsoever, why shouldn't we discuss facts? Do they stop being true if we stop talking about them? Do their ramifications stop existing if we just refuse to accept them?

> It's not like he's going up to black people and saying "you're almost retarded."

Er, why do we think there are no black people reading his blog?

I don't think that there are no black people reading his blog. I have no idea if black people read his blog or not.

Even then, that quote isn't a individual indicitment of stupidity. Something which there are many examples of him doing, more aggressively, in other contexts.

Or his public arguments with Larry Wall.

Eek. That post contains quite a lot of claims that are not backed by a single reference to a primary source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com