>People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?
What the poster is saying is that people should be accountable for what they actually say, not what other people assume they must have meant.
It's subtle, but let me try to highlight the difference:
Take as an example, Stallman saying "...it is entirely possible Minsky could have been unaware of the coercive dynamic [between Epstein and the young womem] going on at the time. We'll call this P.
Also take,
"We should wait for the facts and evidence before jumping to conclusions". We'll call this W.
What Stallman said is just " We don't know if P or not P, therefore W".
There's nothing wrong that was said there. People read things though that were not said; i.e. that since Stallman said P, it must mean he thought that the young women must have been voluntarily doing it. (We'll call this V).
Much of the hulabaloo around the time came from people, (and journalists) adding in context that simply wasn't even there, which a quick perusal of CSAIL quickly made evident. Stallman never said it was the case that anyone involved was doing it of their own volition, merely that Minsky may not have picked up on the fact there was coercion going on, because if someone is being coerced, odds are they have been specifically instructed to hide the coersion. The fact is, one presupposes the knowing complicity of an individual by doing otherwise. Stallman cautioned that one should wait for evidence before coming to a hasty judgement.
Communication is hard. One must transmit, and another must receive, and both people be able to demonstrate they took from the exchange a shared understanding of a common arrangement of circumstance and subject, mapping to the same circumstances and subjects in the real world. The clincher though, is that there is so much low stakes communication that goes on in our lives where errors in reception or coding of meaning don't have readily tangible effects that become apparent within a short enough time for people to recognize a miscommunication happened, or that even if they recognize one happened, that it will adversely effect the outcome of the attempt at communication as a whole. As a result, there is a tendency to chronically underestimate the difficulty of communication overall.
This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?