Bram Cohen (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bramcohen) wrote,@ 2008-10-19 02:36:00 |
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BusinessWeek profile
There's a profile of me in BusinessWeek. It's a fairly reasonable portrayal, although it focuses a bit much on the asperger's angle. I don't really view my life through the whole overcoming disability narrative (same as most people with disabilities), and tell people that in so many words, but it's such a nice story that journalists tend to focus on it a bit. I mention my asperger's to journalists primarily because, well duh, if you're doing a profile on someone and they have an obvious disability that's clearly something worth mentioning.
There are of course some comments from the usual haters. Some of this seems to be based on an assumption that I'm of the anarcho-libertarian stripe, that movement which is really just neo-social darwinism. For the record, I'm not even vaguely a libertarian. I'm in favor of a higher minimum wage (why that thing never gets inflation indexed is beyond me), national health care, a big fat carbon tax, and open immigrations, as are the bulk of all economists. Only one out of those four is even vaguely consistent with libertarianism. I also find Ayn Rand completely unreadable due to a total lack of literary merit, although I will say that using logic to 'prove' the virtue of laissez-faire capitalism when laissez-faire capitalism is one of one's clearly stated axioms is hardly an insight at all.
Other random notes. I don't remember saying the 'only stupid people care about details' comment, although I have a feeling I was making a somewhat qualified point. There are people who perform necessary jobs where all they do is handle lots of little details, and they are not as a rule stupid. I don't know why editors like picking out really bad pictures of me (the one they used for this article was a test shot, with me squinting into the light). I'd gained some weight at the time the video was shot, although I've lost most of it by now. Fiddling with a rubik's cube during a meeting is sort of like talking to someone while they're driving - you stop doing when something important is going on, and it's otherwise not a big deal, although I've learned not to bring fiddle toys to meetings by now.
There's a profile of me in BusinessWeek. It's a fairly reasonable portrayal, although it focuses a bit much on the asperger's angle. I don't really view my life through the whole overcoming disability narrative (same as most people with disabilities), and tell people that in so many words, but it's such a nice story that journalists tend to focus on it a bit. I mention my asperger's to journalists primarily because, well duh, if you're doing a profile on someone and they have an obvious disability that's clearly something worth mentioning.
There are of course some comments from the usual haters. Some of this seems to be based on an assumption that I'm of the anarcho-libertarian stripe, that movement which is really just neo-social darwinism. For the record, I'm not even vaguely a libertarian. I'm in favor of a higher minimum wage (why that thing never gets inflation indexed is beyond me), national health care, a big fat carbon tax, and open immigrations, as are the bulk of all economists. Only one out of those four is even vaguely consistent with libertarianism. I also find Ayn Rand completely unreadable due to a total lack of literary merit, although I will say that using logic to 'prove' the virtue of laissez-faire capitalism when laissez-faire capitalism is one of one's clearly stated axioms is hardly an insight at all.
Other random notes. I don't remember saying the 'only stupid people care about details' comment, although I have a feeling I was making a somewhat qualified point. There are people who perform necessary jobs where all they do is handle lots of little details, and they are not as a rule stupid. I don't know why editors like picking out really bad pictures of me (the one they used for this article was a test shot, with me squinting into the light). I'd gained some weight at the time the video was shot, although I've lost most of it by now. Fiddling with a rubik's cube during a meeting is sort of like talking to someone while they're driving - you stop doing when something important is going on, and it's otherwise not a big deal, although I've learned not to bring fiddle toys to meetings by now.
