I guess my point, such as it is, is that there are at least a couple of thousand people in the world who tick most of the specific boxes in this story, plus a few the story didn't consider.
Hell, I know C++ (I used to have a desk next to someone on the standards committee) and I know cryptography (I was part of the OpenPGP working group and wrote a conforming implementation from the draft spec alone just to prove that the spec was good enough).
Why is nobody claiming I'm Satoshi?
Apart from the fact that I already have a pretty good pseudonym, and that I clearly don't have Satoshi-level crypto knowledge, the real reason is that I'm nobody. Satoshi was a mythical lone genius, which means he must be someone that most people have heard on. Only people with had-a-voice-role-on-The-Simpsons-level fame get attached to rumours like this.
One of the things I would never have guessed back in the 90s is that RMS would turn out to be the prescient futurist and ESR would be the whacked out extremist with a tenuous grip on reality.
An alternative choice would have been to keep silent
Back in the days of Usenet, we used to say "lurk before posting". In this case, making a better attempt to understand what he was wriring about would have helped him enormously.
Having said that, another rule of Usenet was that if you want to learn something, don't ask a question, post wrong information. There should be a safe way to throw an idea out there.
As others have noted, of course, we talk about those who made his memo public (though kept his name off it; we conveniently forget that part) and we don't talk about the other Googlers who took the memo as a misogynist dog whistle in the internal discussions and ran with it. Google showed a distinct lack of spine by sacking him and not them.
The autism thing makes complete sense to me. Damore isn't misogynist, he's merely clueless. I think the lesson for everyone is "finish your PhD".
I think the demonization of meritocracy is a tragedy of the commons. [...] The age of personal responsibility is dead. The idea of success because of *merit* is equally dead.
This kind of thinking would be suicide for an organisation like Google.
There is this myth of the "lone genius", which also gave us copyright and patent maximalism by the way. There are lone geniuses in the world. We've heard of them because they are remarkable, and they are remarkable because they are rare.
In industry, and especially in tech, and especially-especially in high-tech, success or failure belongs to the team. Think of any Big Awesome Science project, like the Apollo Program or the LHC. There are a few individuals who were keys to its success, obviously, but these individuals working alone would never have accomplished the goal. Ultimately, the success of those projects are due to the team.
You can't build an effective team out of lone geniuses. And the number of important things that can successfully be done by lone geniuses working mostly alone is so small that human progress would grind to a halt if we did things that way.
Moreover, "diversity", that much maligned concept, is a critical part of what makes things work. We've all seen devices that are uncomfortable for left-handed people to use, voice-controlled things which don't recognise Scottish or New Zealand accents or voices in the soprano range. Hell, it's only in 2011 that car manufacturers were required to test their vehicles with typically-female-sized crash test dummies.
I don't think this is because of a lack of technical merit on behalf of the engineers who built these less-than-optimal things, merely a lack of awareness. Increasing diversity on the team building a Thing that humans have to use makes the Thing more useful to humans. A product designed, built, and tested by a team of only petite able-bodied women would likely also have usability issues.
Libertarianism is great, bit you can't build a high tech thing that meets its design goals on time and on budget that way.
He wasn't mobbed. Mobbing is when someone gets a torrent of harassment when someone targeted them. He has not reported being harassed.
I would argue that having people who want to use you for their own agenda love-bomb you might also count as "mobbing". It may not feel like mobbing, but it's still mobbing.
There is a lot that is wrong with Damore's memo that deserves a lot of criticism. The guy was (and may still be) deeply ignorant on many topics that he chose to weigh in on. If you look carefully through the media shitstorm, you can even find some of this reasoned criticism.
Nonetheless, he did not make it public outside Google. He did not want to be a target of exasperation and outrage by women in engineering who were pissed off about having to re-explain everything for the thousandth time to someone who clearly doesn't get it. He did not want to be a darling of the alt-right. He did not want to be a celebrity.
I think "mobbed" is still an appropriate word.
Those of us who agree that the memo was more than a little Dunning-Kruger are kidding ourselves if we think he wasn't harassed along with being criticised. Of course he was. This is the Internet we're talking about.
The guy wasn't a jerk because he had (claims to have) Asperger/Autism, he's a jerk because he's a jerk.
I didn't get that at all. What I got was: The guy couldn't handle his accidental fame/infamy in part because of autism.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. How well would most of us do? How about if we've spent most of our time inside Google's echo chamber and don't know very much about the alt-right?
No, it's because his political leanings are by all accounts very much aligned to the people trying to demonise him, hence the multitude of articles trying to position him with the people they don't like.
To be fair, it's also happening in the opposite direction. Damore is something of an alt-right hero, not in the sense that he is alt-right, but in the sense that the alt-right sees him as a hero.
I don't for a moment think that Damore is actually an alt-right kind of guy any more than Taylor Swift is a neo-Nazi.
I hesitate to say 'conspiracy' [...]
I wouldn't, because it doesn't need a conspiracy to explain it. It's just another example of the hyper-partisanship that has arisen in the last few decades.
It would all go away if we all agreed to stop feeding it.
The only reason we diabolize Hitler so much is that he lost.
There is a grain of truth to this. We treat the North Korean regime with kid gloves in part because they won and they have nukes, and not because they're on the correct side of the whole human rights question.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my point, such as it is, is that there are at least a couple of thousand people in the world who tick most of the specific boxes in this story, plus a few the story didn't consider.
True enough. If I had $8 billion in bitcoins... well, I might not cash out all of them...
I worked in IT in the federal public service for about six months. It was one of the most soul-sucking experiences of my life. Hence, only six months.
You're not Strayan, mate. This is the real one.
Twiki, obviously. biddi-biddi-biddi
It's almost certain that Satoshi is a) more than one person, and b) composed of individuals who are not household names.
Hell, I know C++ (I used to have a desk next to someone on the standards committee) and I know cryptography (I was part of the OpenPGP working group and wrote a conforming implementation from the draft spec alone just to prove that the spec was good enough).
Why is nobody claiming I'm Satoshi?
Apart from the fact that I already have a pretty good pseudonym, and that I clearly don't have Satoshi-level crypto knowledge, the real reason is that I'm nobody. Satoshi was a mythical lone genius, which means he must be someone that most people have heard on. Only people with had-a-voice-role-on-The-Simpsons-level fame get attached to rumours like this.
It doesn't mention "climategate"?
The supposed honeytrap targets weren't cybersecurity experts fwiw.
One of the things I would never have guessed back in the 90s is that RMS would turn out to be the prescient futurist and ESR would be the whacked out extremist with a tenuous grip on reality.
I've never seen Thiel and David Miscavige in the same room. Just putting that out there.
Richard Spencer thinks you're wrong. But what would he know.
Do your textbooks teach the "lost cause" theory of the US Civil War, too?
Before I read the summary, I half thought that this might be part of the ongoing sexual harassment scandal...
An alternative choice would have been to keep silent
Back in the days of Usenet, we used to say "lurk before posting". In this case, making a better attempt to understand what he was wriring about would have helped him enormously.
Having said that, another rule of Usenet was that if you want to learn something, don't ask a question, post wrong information. There should be a safe way to throw an idea out there.
As others have noted, of course, we talk about those who made his memo public (though kept his name off it; we conveniently forget that part) and we don't talk about the other Googlers who took the memo as a misogynist dog whistle in the internal discussions and ran with it. Google showed a distinct lack of spine by sacking him and not them.
The autism thing makes complete sense to me. Damore isn't misogynist, he's merely clueless. I think the lesson for everyone is "finish your PhD".
His choices now are bow to the orthodoxy or fight for the truth.
So what you're saying that his only choice is to pick a side in the stupid culture war.
That's precisely what both sides want you to think. Here in the real world there's always a third option.
I think the demonization of meritocracy is a tragedy of the commons. [...] The age of personal responsibility is dead. The idea of success because of *merit* is equally dead.
This kind of thinking would be suicide for an organisation like Google.
There is this myth of the "lone genius", which also gave us copyright and patent maximalism by the way. There are lone geniuses in the world. We've heard of them because they are remarkable, and they are remarkable because they are rare.
In industry, and especially in tech, and especially-especially in high-tech, success or failure belongs to the team. Think of any Big Awesome Science project, like the Apollo Program or the LHC. There are a few individuals who were keys to its success, obviously, but these individuals working alone would never have accomplished the goal. Ultimately, the success of those projects are due to the team.
You can't build an effective team out of lone geniuses. And the number of important things that can successfully be done by lone geniuses working mostly alone is so small that human progress would grind to a halt if we did things that way.
Moreover, "diversity", that much maligned concept, is a critical part of what makes things work. We've all seen devices that are uncomfortable for left-handed people to use, voice-controlled things which don't recognise Scottish or New Zealand accents or voices in the soprano range. Hell, it's only in 2011 that car manufacturers were required to test their vehicles with typically-female-sized crash test dummies.
I don't think this is because of a lack of technical merit on behalf of the engineers who built these less-than-optimal things, merely a lack of awareness. Increasing diversity on the team building a Thing that humans have to use makes the Thing more useful to humans. A product designed, built, and tested by a team of only petite able-bodied women would likely also have usability issues.
Libertarianism is great, bit you can't build a high tech thing that meets its design goals on time and on budget that way.
"You're the jerk, you jerk!" Or something.
He wasn't mobbed. Mobbing is when someone gets a torrent of harassment when someone targeted them. He has not reported being harassed.
I would argue that having people who want to use you for their own agenda love-bomb you might also count as "mobbing". It may not feel like mobbing, but it's still mobbing.
There is a lot that is wrong with Damore's memo that deserves a lot of criticism. The guy was (and may still be) deeply ignorant on many topics that he chose to weigh in on. If you look carefully through the media shitstorm, you can even find some of this reasoned criticism.
Nonetheless, he did not make it public outside Google. He did not want to be a target of exasperation and outrage by women in engineering who were pissed off about having to re-explain everything for the thousandth time to someone who clearly doesn't get it. He did not want to be a darling of the alt-right. He did not want to be a celebrity.
I think "mobbed" is still an appropriate word.
Those of us who agree that the memo was more than a little Dunning-Kruger are kidding ourselves if we think he wasn't harassed along with being criticised. Of course he was. This is the Internet we're talking about.
The guy wasn't a jerk because he had (claims to have) Asperger/Autism, he's a jerk because he's a jerk.
I didn't get that at all. What I got was: The guy couldn't handle his accidental fame/infamy in part because of autism.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. How well would most of us do? How about if we've spent most of our time inside Google's echo chamber and don't know very much about the alt-right?
No, it's because his political leanings are by all accounts very much aligned to the people trying to demonise him, hence the multitude of articles trying to position him with the people they don't like.
To be fair, it's also happening in the opposite direction. Damore is something of an alt-right hero, not in the sense that he is alt-right, but in the sense that the alt-right sees him as a hero.
I don't for a moment think that Damore is actually an alt-right kind of guy any more than Taylor Swift is a neo-Nazi.
I hesitate to say 'conspiracy' [...]
I wouldn't, because it doesn't need a conspiracy to explain it. It's just another example of the hyper-partisanship that has arisen in the last few decades.
It would all go away if we all agreed to stop feeding it.
Culture War Is Over!
(if you want it)
At least they say what they mean at all times, and they don't mince words, lie or attempt to manipulate.
I'm the parent of an autistic child. They sure do attempt to lie and manipulate. They're just very bad at it.
The only reason we diabolize Hitler so much is that he lost.
There is a grain of truth to this. We treat the North Korean regime with kid gloves in part because they won and they have nukes, and not because they're on the correct side of the whole human rights question.
There's a lot to be said for realpolitik.
Don't look so smug. U s of A did the same thing with Kim Dotcom.
Not defending, just explaining.
Observing reality as it is should override "seeing things differently". So there's something to work on.