Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Don't retcon Lambdaconf. Lambdaconf isn't an academic conference. I've been involved with academic conferences (I co-chaired one for USENIX last year), and I've been involved with things like Lambdaconf. Both kinds of thing are valuable and important, but they're also different.

The purpose a conference is to select works for inclusion in the citation record for a field. The conference presentations themselves are secondary to the proceedings of the conference. A good way to know you're looking at an scientific conference is to find the Program Committee, which is the group responsible for determining which papers will and won't be accepted. Most scientific conferences are defined by their Program Committee.

I can't find Lambdaconf's PC online. I assume it has one?

Lambdaconf is an industry event. It's a gathering of enthusiasts that is mostly commercial and social in nature. Its presentations will be cited online informally. Because many of them are presentations by the authors of open source functional programming software, the subjects of those presentations may even be cited formally --- but it's unlikely that any of the talks themselves will be.

If Lambdaconf were an academic conference, I would have different feelings about their pointed inclusion of a noisome white supremacist. But it isn't; it's fundamentally a commercial event. It can't hide behind "science".

I understand how the materials presented at a conference are used differently after the conference depending on whether it was academic/scientific or commercial/engineering, but does that really matter from the point of view of the attendees?

I was not trying to imply that Lambdaconf is a scientific conference. My point was that in technical fields one's ability in the field is largely orthogonal to one's religious or political beliefs. People can be first rate programmers, engineers, or scientists while holding offensive or stupid religious and political beliefs. Limiting oneself to only learning from those with compatible religious and political beliefs, or only being willing to be in the same building as people with the same religious and political beliefs, will make it much harder to become first rate.

It matters because the reasons for including or excluding people are different at commercial events and scientific ones.

We can reasonably be very concerned about excluding a genuine contribution from a scientific conference, because that would be a case in which our personal politics were directly impacting the cite record, which in turn makes it harder for everyone to "do science". There are people in my field that I like more and people I like much, much less, but I didn't have any difficulty putting that aside on the PC of the last conference I was involved in: you rate the paper, not the author, because you have to.

That's not the case at an industry event, because scientific progress doesn't depend in any way on events like Lambdaconf.

To your point about the attendees: sure! If attendees of Lambdaconf really want to see a talk about a marginal distributed system by Yarvin, it is legitimate for the conference organizers to cater to the market by having him on. Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

Between your comment upthread and my response, I think you're left with the trickier argument to support.

This is some epic semantic nitpicking right here.

> Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

It is in the interests of any technical conference to discourage radical political agitators from using the conference as a political battleground, whether it's a "scientific" or "commercial" conference.

What commercial event wouldn't want to shield itself from the opinions of the market by claiming some amorphous "technical conference" status? I have no trouble understanding why De Goes prefers to frame the issue this way.

The parent wrote this:

I was not trying to imply that Lambdaconf is a scientific conference. My point was that in technical fields one's ability in the field is largely orthogonal to one's religious or political beliefs.

You are thus actively ignore his central point.

> Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

If the anti-inclusion folks were merely "publicly expressing market preferences" they wouldn't be so furious about how LambdaConf managed to find enough funding to keep going. They're already not going, and they've said so loudly and publicly, right? So why are they so bothered that anyone is going, that the conference continues to exist at all?

It's not about justice; it's about power. Simple as that. It's not enough to not attend a talk by Yarvin, or even to not go to a conference he's attending; it's about making sure he can't speak, anywhere, pour encourager les autres.

Everyone who said they wouldn't do business with companies operating in Apartheid South Africa --- or who (further) argued that governments should divest from anything entangled with Apartheid --- was in exactly the same situation. It wasn't enough for them to simply stop patronizing Tesco. They organized and exerted pressure where they could. Overall, the movement was in some significant part credited with ending Apartheid.

So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend. I feel, as many others do, that I have a right to use my voice and whatever influence the market has ill-advisedly allocated to me to assert my point of view.

Lambdaconf appears to believe strongly in their point of view. That's fine. If anyone's advocating criminalizing bad decisions about conference speaker slots, well, I'm not on board for that.

You are of course welcome to use your own speech to argue that I should shut up, or that Aphyr should or that Steve Klabnik should shut up, or whatever. You can also use your speech rights to find ridiculous people on Twitter and Tumblr to compare me with. You're allowed to ask for things you're not going to get.

Unlike people like Klabnik and Aphyr, who are to some extent engaged in "functional programming" as its own thing, I'm not so much motivated by the future of Lambdaconf. My motivation for being involved in this discussion is different and nerdier. I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating. That's all!

> So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend

If you want to complain loudly about the conference as you don't attend, go for it. But once you're pressuring sponsors into pulling out, once you're running a weeks-long harassment campaign against the organizers, and especially once you're pitching a fit about the conference managing to find other funding despite your best efforts, that goes way, way, way beyond mere complaining. You are making an affirmative effort to prevent the conference from happening at all, and at the very least I'd suggest that you own it.

I feel like the comment I just wrote responds to everything in this comment.

Using violence to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Abusing a monopoly, or colluding with peers to create an abusive cartel, to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Lying to coercively trick people into a preferred outcome is wrong. None of that is happening here.

If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

There's a perfectly coherent intellectual framework that sees the divestiture movement as wrong, too, but we're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that.

> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

Those actions by themselves are not necessarily right or wrong; it's the reason for the action which makes the difference.

It was right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany's campaign of conquest. It would not be right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe because of someone jaywalking in Berlin.

It was right to mount a boycott campaign of South Africa and call the rulers of South Africa racists in order to end apartheid. Is it right to mount a boycott campaign against LambdaConf and call its organizers racists because in a blind evaluation they selected a speaker whose personal politics, which will not be touched on in any way at the convention, you find repellent?

We're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that. More accurately, you are unlikely to have a productive discussion in any context whatsoever, because you will be unable to evaluate ideas outside the context of the man who holds them.

I didn't call the organizers of Lambdaconf racist.

My feelings about De Goes, who I have barely paid any attention to up until this recent slapfight, are much more complicated (and boring) than that.

Other people may have called Lambdaconf itself racist.

Given how De Goes handled this, I'm not surprised.

The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

> The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.

We live in a culture where people have been primed to go nuclear, not just at the tiniest slight against them, but at the faintest media-driven rumor that some other person somewhere, who may not even exist, may have in theory been slighted. If those people cause drama, it is the fault of those people, not anyone else.

I'm not sure you followed what I just wrote. I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts.

That's, uh. Wow. Quite the accusation.

For starters, how does De Goes benefit from generating this drama? Most of the sponsors pulled out and he's been smeared as a racist from one end of the Internet to the other, in an era where that accusation is literally career-ending. Do you really think he decided to blow up LambdaConf in an enormous suicide bomb, and that all the fellow conference managers were okay with that?

I am not accusing De Goes of being a racist. Just because his actions had consequences you feel in hindsight were predictable does not mean that he felt that way at the time. He chose to write what he wrote.

"I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts."

That sounded awfully like you were accusing him of doing all this deliberately. But if you think it was all an accident, then okay.

Thought experiment: Your name is De Goes. You strongly believe that people's political opinions or personal characteristics should have no bearing on their professional life; to that point, you made sure to set up a blinded system for choosing LambdaConf speakers so nobody's prejudices, conscious or unconscious, could play a role. As a reward for actually practicing what Internet slacktivists merely preach, you have just discovered that one of the selected speakers turned out to be the infamous criminal Goldst -- er, Moldbug.

What's the PR move that gets you through this without fundamentally betraying your principles by giving in to the baying mob?

> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.

That one went by a little quick for me. Some tactics worked on apartheid, so it can also be used to sabotage a conference with a racist speaker? Maybe so, but that's a pretty big leap without explanation.

The commenter to whom I was responding was suggesting that organizing a boycott is somehow unethical. Clearly that is not the case as a general rule.

> I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating.

Did you just imply that I'm a nerd?

Lucky for you the d20 I rolled to see if I was offended came up 20 so I am not.

No. Well, yes, but we're both nerds, just on opposite ends of this particular debate.

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