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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: who cares? Do we need to have an opinion about this? This is Bill Ackman spending a pittance on a disgraced researcher. Maybe it'll pan out, and we can have a searching discussion about the implications of funded discoveries being made by problematic professionals. But until the lab actually does something meaningful, why bother picking it apart? Bill Ackman doubtless spends much more money than this on much more distasteful things than this; he's a billionaire, so his loafers are almost certainly former gophers.

It feels like one of those "announcement of an announcement" or "bill introduced in Parliament" stories that we usually deem off-topic for HN. Not that it couldn't possibly matter, simply that it doesn't matter enough for us to intelligently discuss yet.

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Mobs derive power from their ability to lynch people they don't like.

If a billionaire follows along behind the mob, cutting people down from trees and resuscitating them, it severely diminishes the power of the mob.

Whether you think this is a good thing or not probably depends on whether you're part of the lynch mob, but it's hard to imagine being neutral about this.

What are you talking about? Nobody is being lynched.

This is the kind of weird discussion we don't have to have if we just wait to see if any of this matters before trying to parse it as an important story.

1. A group of people decided that Sabatini is a Bad Person.

2. As a result, they want to end his career.

3. A billionaire came along and undermined those efforts, by providing Sabatini with independent funding.

4. The people who decided that Sabatini's career should be ended are upset by this.

Sure, nobody is being literally lynched; but the fundamental story -- people being upset that their ability to exercise extrajudicial punishment is being undermined -- is the same.

I don't care. Why do I care? Why does any of this matter? He got fired from his previous job. Now a billionaire is funding his lab startup. It will probably come to nothing, just like every other investment does. You apparently care enough to equate what's happened with a torture-murder. The conversation here seems unhinged. This is all very low-stakes right now.

If you ask people to be upset about things, they will oblige you. Here, it seems like you're more or less begging for it.

You're the one commenting here.

Looks like you got modded down but that was my first thought browsing this now. It's odd to see someone who doesn't care so much that they'll fight you tooth and nail to show you how much they don't care. This raises a beige alert for me.

There is one side saying "omg look at this horrible person who didn't get punished enough for being horrible".

And there is one side saying "omg this guy is a good researcher and the mob is out to get him".

And there is tptaceck saying "none of this matters and you are both obnoxious".

That's my interpretation of it - I do not endorse any particular statement.

My interpretation is that tptacek got confused by a mirror.

It's tptacek arguing with cperciva. The essence of HN.

analogy /əˈnalədʒi/

noun a comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

a correspondence or partial similarity.

a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects.

Being fired from your job is in no way comparable to a lynching.

He wasn't merely fired, though; he was fired and has a mob actively trying to prevent him from ever getting another job.

So does David Shor. Unsuccessfully, obviously, in both cases! Neither have been lynched. Words mean things.

Words mean things, but meanings change over time. In the 21st century in the Western world, the noun "witch hunt" and the verb "to lynch" are generally understood to be metaphorical in usage.

Similarly, if a journalist talks about a "political earthquake" or a "horse race" they don't mean that the earth is literally moving or that politicians are literally equine.

I think you're going to find people are less and less tolerant of semantic drift with the term "lynch". "Witch hunt" is a better term to use.

For my part, I don't concede that there was anything like a witch hunt here. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, or to evaluate your own opinion. I did some reading, read the complaint in the guy's lawsuit, and none of this is clear to me. All I know is that I mentioned the guy's name near some biotech people and got "no mercy for anybody who Photoshops their western blots". I don't know what that means, so take it for what it's worth.

I don't think the (drifted) meanings of "lynch" and "witch hunt" are at all the same. The former applies in cases of "that guy is bad and we need to punish him"; the latter in cases of "there are bad people out there and we need to find them".

I'm not telling you how things ought to be (though I have my opinions there, too). I'm telling you how they are. You should avoid using the word "lynch" the way you are. It's a poor rhetorical strategy that will get you into long skinny threads like this more often than you want to be. But, you do you!

Point taken. I'm in Canada which -- while it has its own embarrassing historical issues -- doesn't have the same recent history of literal lynchings which the American South has. So I can imagine that there might be more sensitivity to that term on your side of the border.

Fine, but it’s not for you to decide which analogies I’m allowed to make.

Also, have you read the definition I copy-pasta’d?

Finally, as other have already commented, your framing is wrong: he hasn’t just been fired, but it’s being argued that his mere professional existence is a threat, and there are more morally sound individuals that deserve the resources spent on him. That’s not “just being fired”

"Billionaire so rich and evil that we shouldn't care about the details."

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