Similarly, it's new name is "dictionary" not "jargon", and so simple definitions of technical terms are perfectly consistent. It's doing what it says on the tin. And speaking of doing what it says on the tin, why in the world should a "new hackers dictionary" care about lisp and not about unix?

Basically it's like, yes, exactly, he picked up the jargon file, updated it, added a lot of unix material and deemphasised lisp, and included more simple technical terms, made it more of a new dictionary, and called it a new dictionary. These are all perfectly ok things to do.

This whole critique is like complaining that someones "new blueberry pie" isn't a cake and doesn't even have any apples.

I think those remarks were unwise, because he should understand how they will be heard by a lot of people.

Empathy is imagining yourself in someone else's position, not necessarily to hold or agree with or approve of that position, but to understand that position.

It's an example of employing the facility of empathy to understand why a killer killed for instance. Until you put yourself in their positon, you don't know if it was a murder or self defense. You actually had to empathise with a murderer simply to interpret the act and decide that it was murder.

You never had to like or agree with them, but you had to understand them.

So it requires a capacity for empathy to imagine how a lot of people will interpret statements like those, in the context he wrote them. I would say the statements themselves are not automatically wrong, but the context is that he is both a public figure with a lot of people that don't like him because his positions hurt their ability to abuse everyone else, and so everything he says anywhere will be used for all it's worth (and statements like that are worth a lot), and he is not a clinical human sexuality researcher or doctor etc just talking to other doctors in some research paper.

I think he's perfectly allowed to have those opinions internally and that he is not any sort of danger to kids or women because of it, and with him doing no harm to others there is no justification for harming him.

But he should have known where & when it's sensible to say such things.

And maybe he did. It's possible he employed a fully working empathic facility to imagine how a lot of people would hear that, and did it anyway because he just wanted to say it and accept what comes. I myself had to make that choice to write this comment.

But it does seem more likely a failure of empathy to fail to predict what people will make of someone in his position (not a doctor, in that field, speaking purely clinically, only to other doctors in that same field) saying anything even remotely like that at all. It's either that or stupid and he's not stupid.