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I find it a real stretch to construe Crockford's use of the word “promiscuous” as a pejorative. Given the context, his usage of the word was apt and descriptive (promiscuous does not necessarily refer to sexuality) without negative connotations; he actually made the opposite case: “that's good because that allows us to get introduced to things”.

By "in his post announcing his talk," I assume you mean "in his post defending himself and explaining his perspective, after being attacked by HUAC, Red Channels and the entire John Birch Society."

I shouldn't post. But at long last, sir, have you no decency?

>will write many paragraphs suggesting that science has established white people are smarter than black people (but maybe that shouldn't matter to us so much!) in his post announcing his talk

I don't think he did this? Do you have a link? The only post I can find of his that discuss race and the conference, is in response to the the accusations of racism and what it means for the conference. In which case it is perfectly fair for him to discuss the two, since that is what the whole issue was about.

> Unfortunately, there's no rulebook conference organizers (or their Greek choruses on message boards) can consult to say when rejecting a speaker is a good idea or not. It's a judgement call.

There is! if they bothered to write one.

I know, I know, everyone gets up in arms about Codes of Conduct, because they're oppressive SJW tools used to silence men, or whatever. But this, right here, is their use case.

If you want definitive standards, by which we can semi-objectively measure whether someone should be dis-invited from a conference, then consider a community statement of what constitutes [un]acceptable behavior.

Virtually every code of conduct will prohibit misogyny. But that's part of what Crockford seems to have been accused of. The problem isn't judging the underlying issues; the problem is judging whether they're really manifest in a particular speaker, or whether (instead) that speaker just happened to piss someone off with a grudge.

Again: there could be stuff going on here that we don't get to know about.

"misogyny" meaning... being a misogynist? being labeled a misogynist? a documented history of sexual harassment? being a man raised in Western society? using misogynist language? the "B-word" or the "C-word"? talking over another panelist? forcible rape? eating miso soup? being socially awkward? getting called out on Twitter? having pictures of half-naked women in your slide deck, as a build-up to a joke? trying to pick up women?

I would hope that we all agree on "no misogyny" as an ideal, but that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What is the actionable threshold? Both personally, and for your community? (Rhetorical question.)

The reader might say "now you're infantilizing convention attendees" and I don't disagree. Over-specifying behavioral standards is indeed infantilizing. But I would say that, to the degree you refuse to specify acceptable behavior, you waive your right to criticize arbitrary action taken by the management.

I can't tell whether we agree or not. The idea that misogyny is such a third-rail issue that anything you can six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connect to it is lethal? That's (to me) repellant, and if Crockford is being uninvited from this conference because of his "strong stuff in programs" bit, that's ridiculous --- in the sense of, "worthy of ridicule".

That's my point: these things are judgement calls. There aren't simple rules. To me, sound judgement suggests that making allusions to physical strength as part of a metaphor about code is perfectly all right (you might not like the metaphor, but you might not like lots of things Crockford says).

I didn't mean that it's a third-rail issue, but rather that different communities (and the individuals within) can have completely different standards of what constitutes "misogyny" and it's better to have discussion about it beforehand rather than after an incident, and it's a mistake to assume judgment calls are obvious. If they were, this thread wouldn't exist, right?

Fundamentally, I'm wary of any argument that relies upon "sound judgment" when we see time and again that there is no consensus on what that is. It's like when you see "clearly" in a math paper. OBVIOUSLY it isn't clear to me, otherwise I wouldn't be reading it.

Online communities have values re: misogyny that range in permissiveness from "ban men entirely" (your 'safe space') to the 4chan /b/ model. You can see that there is indeed a spectrum of opinion and that the entire spectrum is dense with examples, and surely everyone thinks theirs is the most reasonable in that given circumstance.

In the extreme 'safe space' model, someone like Crockford would be right out for (e.g.) the implicit misogyny in reflexively valuing masculine physical strength over more typically feminine attributes. You could counter "but the community is not that kind of safe space and doesn't require that level of metaphorical precision" (and I would agree with you entirely) but then we're having a discussion about our common expectations around a community's values.

You can decide, in your experience, that your particular set of biases reflect the zeitgeist. You can conclude "my ruling will alienate the least amount of people" or "this action will give people the sense that justice has been done" with whatever ethical or societal minmaxing strategy you choose. The core task is this: we live in a world that includes all of white nationalists, misogynists, deeply traumatized people who feel pain simply from reading certain words, and all manner of non-normative people; who are you going to exclude, and will you do it implicitly or explicitly? "Just the shitty, grudge-holding radical feminists on Twitter" is a low-hanging fruit, there are plenty other groups to consider.

That is not my counter regarding Crockford. Rather, my judgement tells me that the notion that physical strength is inherently "masculine" in some way that excludes non-masculine people is nonsensical. I don't accept it, and so the whole argument falls apart.

No carefully calibrated Code of Conduct would have avoided this. The Soviet Union had a pretty liberal constitution, too; didn't help all those folks who were sent to the gulags.

Rules are worth precisely as much as the people who are interpreting and executing them. In the Nodevember case, we already know what sort of people those are.

If only there was a system of rule making where those accused of violations could defend themselves before being found guilty.

If only...

Unfortunately this all started with the decision that it was okay to ostracize some people for their unrelated political views. It's a little late to say "wait, wait, I just meant those guys!" now that you've given this unstoppable superweapon to every grasping, sociopathic political activist in the industry.

No, it's not.

This Manichaean view of intolerance to overt racism, sexism, classism, whatever --- it's bogus, and deserves to be challenged. When spelled out: "opposition at private events to (say) racism requires that event to make common cause with the evil, gathering forces of political repression", it doesn't even sound credible.

But that view in fact appeals superficially to message board nerds because it triggers the circuit in our brain that wants social problems to be solvable with simple boolean logic, and that recoils from subjective, contextual, or situational judgement calls. It's easy to invoke it and conjure an argument that will garner upvotes and spproval.

The real world is usually not describable in an if statement that fits neatly into 80 columns. Some judgements even require iteration! That's what "judgement" is about.

Schools. Hospitals. Academic conferences. Political office. Probably even jobs. These are places where the bar for exclusion is much harder to clear. If Curtis Yarvin gets accepted to a postdoc program at Berkeley and leftist programmers picket, I'll be right there with you. But events like Nodevember, Strange Loop, and Lambdaconf are not academic conferences, they're not a serious part of the citation record for their field, they're put on by private citizens with their own objectives, they're fundamentally about entertainment, and they can make whatever calls they want.

From what I can tell, it looks like Strange Loop handled their problem pretty OK, that LambdaConf probably made a mistake, and that this Node.js conference in Tennessee is also probably making a mistake.

But, again, we don't know all the details here. We knew a lot more in the previous two conference cases.

"But events like Nodevember, Strange Loop, and Lambdaconf are not academic conferences, they're not a serious part of the citation record for their field, they're put on by private citizens with their own objectives, they're fundamentally about entertainment, and they can make whatever calls they want."

Claiming that a technical conference is "fundamentally about entertainment" is about as convincing a dodge as those "for entertainment purposes only" notices on pirate video sites. Technical conferences are an important way people in a field network, educate themselves, and advance their careers. You're stating that it's okay to blacklist people from advancing their careers because they have a political viewpoint that you don't like. Were you okay with the Hollywood blacklist in the '50s? Because that's what this is.

(And to forestall it: of course they have the legal right to do this, just as the blacklisters in Hollywood did. That doesn't make it morally right.)

I am very much a message board nerd; it has never been my intent in invoking that term to set myself apart from other people. You can verify that for yourself with the search bar at the bottom of the page: I'm usually pretty careful to include the words "like us". I wasn't this time, but now you know, and we don't need to litigate that point anymore.

Your latter point is pure relativism. What can't you say that about? People make important business connections by going to bars together, by asking their friends for favors, by selecting cofounders, by playing in the same video game leagues.

The argument about the Hollywood blacklist would be biting if I hadn't foreclosed on it in the comment you responded to without reading very carefully. Perhaps you thought that point was crafty or subtle, but it is in fact banal, lumbering, noisome; you can see it coming on the horizon from the first words typed on a thread like this. You might as well invoke Nazism.

My argument is simple, and you'll need to address it head on. The people suggesting that excluding any speaker ever is some kind of Pandora's Box that opens every event up to trolling and zealotry are making two untenable arguments:

* That there is a set of principles about exclusion OR inclusion that is somehow immune to gaming and manipulation by bad faith participants. No, any set of principles you conjure will be gamed if you don't use judgement.

* That there even exists some simple set of rules we can all follow, something that fits in 80 columns to match our source code style guide, that will resolve all these problems. No, these problems are complicated.

You want this problem to be so simple that you can beat people over the head with the obvious right answer. It's not simple. It's complicated, multi-segmented, floppy, unwieldy. You swing it through the air at people's heads, but it curls up on itself as you do, and the only thing that hits your opponents argument is a bit more air.

If someone is marching around in jackboots and a swastika armband talking about how we need to invade Poland, then it is indeed appropriate to invoke Nazism. And if someone is advocating that people should be blackballed in an industry purely because of their unpopular but also completely unrelated political views, then it is indeed appropriate to invoke the Hollywood blacklist.

Anyway, we're getting way off my original point, which was that this weapon of yours doesn't care who it's pointed at. Once you've unleashed the blacklisting, it'll get used against people you don't want it to. As has happened here.

>That there even exists some simple set of rules we can all follow, something that fits in 80 columns to match our source code style guide, that will resolve all these problems. No, these problems are complicated.

Resolving all the problems is not the goal. The norm of not excluding people for their political views is a truce, not an optimized solution.

Yes, it doesn't perfectly resolve all problems, but the problems it leaves unresolved are less damaging than fights over the correct people to exclude.

> people suggesting that excluding any speaker ever

Oh? I did not see a single comment to that precise effect. Care to source that? Otherwise, why do you turn what actually is being said into a caricature, then turn around and accuse others of wanting things to be simple?

Yeah, I don't know about that. I don't think it's possible to consistently apply good judgement about subjective and polarising issues in highly visible contexts without excessive costs.

Judgement is often possible in business because good judgement and self interest are frequently closely aligned. It is also often possible in government, because there are laws and rules in place that try to ensure an impartial and fair process.

On the other hand, projects with high visibility such as conferences are very much exposed to mob justice fuelled by social media and I don't know if it's possible at all to apply consistently fair and good judgement in a context like that. Really the only example I can think of is dang's and sctb's excellent work here on HN and quite frankly I don't know if that model would work anywhere else.

Your argument here is that it's harder to moderate a small, in-real-life, private, subject-focussed event than it is to moderate one of the Internet's most popular open- to- all- comers technical message boards?

No, that wasn't my argument. Obviously moderating HN requires a lot more effort. That being said, an argument could be made that the HN's status and the people it has access to makes it easier to successfully implement a decent system of moderation.

My actual argument was that it's rather difficult to exercise consistently good judgement when surrounded by an angry mob, if that makes sense.

If Curtis Yarvin gets accepted to a postdoc program at Berkeley and leftist programmers picket, I'll be right there with you. But events like Nodevember, Strange Loop, and Lambdaconf are not academic conferences, they're not a serious part of the citation record for their field, they're put on by private citizens with their own objectives, they're fundamentally about entertainment, and they can make whatever calls they want.

I realize it wasn't directed toward me, but I genuinely appreciate hearing that distinction. Unless things have changed, though, it seems unlikely that Curtis would go back to Berkeley. He describes his disappointment with his academic time there in an eloquent if verbose essay: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr.... In particular, you might enjoy the contrast between his preferred "adversarial approach to CS papers" and what his description of the politicized situation at Berkeley.

---

Did you happen to see this comment on your "winding down Starfighter" thread?

I'd never seen that twitter account before. Not my cup of tea.

Things that seemed cool until I looked (even a little) closer at the people behind them: urbit, stockfighter, and ESR's homepage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12416612

I'm not sure how to interpret it, but I found it ironic that you (or at least Starfigher) is being lumped in with Curtis. If the trend continues, perhaps in a few years you'll both be on the same side of that picket line!