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Comment by simag | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with Stallman's skepticism (I do think it harms children and I don't think children can make that choice). But that one liner does not make him a pedophilia advocate. That makes him someone who is wrong on that topic.

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He didn't know what he was talking about, but felt it was okay to use his public platform to say it anyway. That's not scepticism. It's laziness. We have reams of evidence to show that paedophilia is harmful to children, and a 5 minute web search would have returned some of it.

> He didn't know what he was talking about, but felt it was okay to use his public platform to say it anyway.

You've described basically every single human being in tech I've ever met, they just don't have as big a platform. See: Musk's twitter feed, for instance.

If this is so easy, please provide links to research, preferably not done by a clearly biased organization. (E.g. not IICSA) Books are acceptable too, as long as they're research.

There are only a handful of case studies of really bad cases I'm aware of. And they're not that exacting in follow-up.

Note research, not opinion pieces.

Good quality papers. I found just a handful. I'm having trouble fishing then out from the thousands of opinion pieces.

Edit: I found one credible meta-analysis so far, and the results are not good. Most of abuse is not reported. Impact is not known, how handling of it is done is unknown to affect severity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3720272/

And he did retract that more than a decade old statement.

It took him a decade to retract that statement, said retraction conveniently occurring when this shitstorm about Epstein is reaching a crescendo. Retractions and apologies with such timing appear awfully convenient and insincere.

Who remembers everything they've said more than a decade ago? He was reminded now that he had said that and has changed his views on it.

This isn't a verbal conversation, this is something he wrote on his own blog, no?

Yes, but one doesn't have neither written or regular speech memorized so it doesn't matter which it was.

Why did it take him takes to come the the conclusion that sexually abusing children is wrong? And why are you defending that?

Because who remembers everything they've said? I do what?

Yeah but is there a web search engine that respects your freedom?

If you're wrong about something, are famous and put that wrong thing on your site, you are advocating for that wrong thing.

Because people believing in that wrong thing will point to you as a figure of authority.

Not fair, but life's not fair.

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