Hacker News Reader

Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N63/abelson.html

"We don’t know what we’ll find as the answers unfold, but I expect to find that every person acted in accordance with MIT policy. More than that: they acted in the belief that their actions were legally and ethically proper."

I'm a little concerned with Mr. Abelson's comment here. Given that he expects to find everything was done correctly and states as near fact that they were before starting, is he really impartial enough to be in charge of such an internal investigation.

View on HN

It's funny, when I first read that sentence, I heard a very different tone in my head. I heard: "I expect to find..." in the sense a parent might say "I expect to find that you cleaned your room." Of course they don't expect it, but they do expect it.

Please remember that Prof. Abelson is one of the founders of Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. He was undoubtedly chosen because of his credentials in the area of free culture. It is fairly insulting to suggest he will simply ignore the truth out of some unknown motive.

Just to add to your list (Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation): Abelson also cofounded MIT Open Courseware, Public Knowledge, and he is a Director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. His contributions to free culture and technology are amazing.

and an author of one of the more mind-expanding computer programming books ever.

Good point, you can read his message two ways:

1) "I'm sure none of us did anything wrong."

2) "If any of us were wrong, then that's NOT OK."

Given that he expects to find everything was done correctly

I don't think that stating expectations is necessarily indicative of partiality, he may just be expressing his current thinking. As an engineer, I go into nearly every project with certain expectations, the issue is whether or not I accept the data that challenges those expectations. MIT culture does instill in its students and staff the need to "go where the data take you," so I think folks should give him a chance.

Also "acted in accordance with MIT policy" doesn't mean "did the right thing," the conclusion may be that policy changes are needed.

End result is that personal responsibility is mooted, but if the people in power are exposed as mindless policy toadies I suppose it could be worse.

Whilst I have serious concerns over MIT policy, it is not unreasonable that that "several cogs in the system" acted according policy, leading to an extremely flawed result.

In an aircraft mishap investigation, they regularly conclude that it was a series of minor issues/deficiencies causes a crash, not a single pilot/crew/person making a single huge error.

I know Hal, and he's someone that I would trust; he's someone who has a lot of integrity, and is someone who is quite sympathetic to Aaron's goals (although perhaps not to specific methods). So I disbelieve that this is going to be in any way a whitewash.

I suspect his main goal is to not turn the initial fact-finding phase of the report into an adversarial, witch hunt.

It's an interesting question whether MIT should have been the equivalent of a hostile witness in a courtroom, refusing to turn over any bit of evidence without a court order or a search warrant, because of a concern (which they might or might not have been able to forsee at the time) of prosecutorial overreach. But that's really a phase 2 question. The first thing that needs to happen is that Hal's effort (I assume he will be convening some kind of committee) will need to establish the facts and the timeline. And in order to do that, he needs to make sure that he gets cooperation from the various parts of the MIT administration who participated in this Greek Tragedy. His words about having an expectation that people behaved properly I think needs to be made in that light. A parent always has the expectation that their children has behaved properly. And it's only fair that a parent use that as a presumption of innocence. If it turns out that the child really did misbehave, at that point the expectation can of course turn into a profound sense of disappointment.

I've seen this kind of thing out of MIT too often to 'trust process' or anything like that. See the Meal Plan debacle if you need to be corrected of that trust.

I am not cynical about individual people, though. Hal Abelson seems like a good choice, though I for one hope he does not convene a committee on this subject, because in that direction lies a soulless, unenlightening report.

That's very unconventional, that a person tasked with a review shows that he has 'expectations' before having completed his review.

Abelson may have tainted his report already if it finds no wrongdoing, that was a very poor choice of words.

Lots of people were skeptical about his nomination (I certainly was not one of those) but this really makes me wonder.

Why the skepticism?

SICP is one of my favourite books but there's a moral hazard in getting one of your own to conduct reviews. Personal relationships always cause bias.

I didn't hear a single skeptical voice. Given Abelson's background, I can think of few people at MIT better for the job. If anything, I could imagine him being too partial towards Aaron (and maybe that was the skepticism?).

I don't think he has tainted anything for anybody, with the possible exception of tainting it for those who are currently wielding torches and pitchforks, but nothing will appease then.

I didn't hear a single skeptical voice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5051946

I read recently that Abelson has some ties to JSTOR and/or JSTOR management personnel. I hope that these will be fully described in the report, as well.

Personally, I don't expect that any wrong-doing on JSTOR's part will come out of this, so while it makes sense to list possible biases in the report, I'm more interested in MIT's and the prosector's actions.

If Abelson has ties to JSTOR and/or JSTOR involved personnel, his should disclose these as part of his reporting.

I was initially pleased with his choice, then subsequently surprised to learn of these ostensible ties in a sentence or two within some reporting or commentary that I don't have at hand, at the moment.

(So... if such ties don't exist, I am fully open to being corrected on this point. But, my recollection is fairly strong, if not specific -- in part due to the reinforcing nature of my surprise.)

P.S. I'll have a look for that bit of reporting that caught my attention, when I have a chance...

I'm not finding what I read. The closest I've found is the text at the end (quoted) of this Slashdot summary:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/22/0219224/mit-warned-of...

theodp continues " MIT's Wolpert, who was recently named to an advisory board for JSTOR parent Ithaka, also chairs the Management Board of the MIT Press, where her reports from 2008-2010 included JSTOR Managing Director Laura Brown and MIT's Hal Abelson, adding another twist to Abelson's analysis of MIT's involvement in the Swartz tragedy."

Really, you are upset by his JSTOR connections... not the fact he is an MIT Professor?

This is not an impartial investigation... Whether he has connections with JSTOR makes no difference to that fact.

Another translation is that: They acted "in the belief" that they were doing the legal and ethical thing, and they acted in accordance to current MIT policy. However, MIT policy was flawed, and these people were misguided.

The report may well end up being a condemnation of the system, which is just as well. Abelson is perhaps preparing people (particularly the witchhunt crowd) for the possibility that there was not a malicious actor on MIT's side, yet the system is still broken enough to allow such tragedies to occur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com