Comment by IsaacL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IsaacL | Hacker News Reader

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I have learned not to jump to conclusions in these stories, even when I want to back my ideological "team". (I'm not a fan of SJWs, but many of the anti-SJWs make up for it by being even worse).

The Nodevember statement seems reasonable on its face:

"[...] his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak.

We reacted to this feedback. Nothing else. Any other speculation around his past behavior was not taken into account.

This conference was started by a group of friends to gather around the love of a shared language and community.

We are in over our heads. The conference has grown to something we never anticipated. We aren't professional organizers or PR people. We are still learning, and will make mistakes. We don't do this as a full time job. We do this because we love the community."

OK, they're just a group of friends doing their thing, and it's their club, their rules.

On the other hand: they're charging $350 a ticket, so can hardly be complete amateurs. It sounds like they're trying to downplay any political angle, when excluding such a speaker would inevitably be seen as a political move in the current climate.

(Conference for an extremely hip, progressive community (Node) excludes old-school elitist greybeard. Only reasons cited publicly are mildly condescending remarks in Crawford's public talks and unelaborated backchannel complaints).

So, though I don't know enough and so withhold firm judgement, it does appear that the Nodevember organisers thought they could deliver a public slap to Crockford by ostracising him, proving some political point, and are now downplaying their own behaviour to avoid the PR backlash.

Either way, it is their club, their rules. The real solution to this is for those closer to Crockford's philosophy of life to assert their right to free association, and host an elitist conference for Real Programmers where noobs are flamed, idiocy is excluded, truth and justice reigns supreme, etc.

Edit: I've just seen this https://twitter.com/nexxylove/status/771503661956501504 which makes it look as though the Nodevember organisers were bullied into excluding Crockford to deflect a PR s...storm about their insufficiently diverse keynote speakers.

Even the thread you cited claims there were other speakers who came forward. Unless there's some public acknowledgement over what the deciding factors are, this is a lot of speculation over what little public conversation (on twitter at that, so inherently lacking a lot of the full explanation) exists.

Instead of inserting your own narrative into how and why this occurred and pouring gasoline on the fire, how about let cooler heads prevail. If Crockford feels wronged by this exchange, he's free to come forward with his side of things (and other parties with theirs) if a public debate needs to occur. Until then, this is a lot of people being roped into proxy battle of "SJWs" vs "un-PC enthusiasts" that frankly has little to do with an actual set of circumstances.

> this is a lot of speculation

This is only speculation if you ignore the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism.

All the evidence points to this being a proxy battle of "SJWs" vs "un-PC enthusiasts". Nodevember were told that having Crockford speak "sent a message that women are unwelcome".

> Instead of inserting your own narrative

This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.

> If Crockford feels wronged by this exchange, he's free to come forward with his side of things

Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.

But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.

(A side note, but it's weird that TDD-enthusiasts are very condescending to non-TDD followers, but this isn't seen as "exclusive").

> Nodevember were told that having Crockford speak "sent a message that women are unwelcome".

I saw the tweet, my point here is that's a single tweet raising a red flag about what is undoubtedly an issue that was talked about to a greater extent behind closed doors with relevant parties. If you find that justification to be insufficient irregardless of whatever the backing details may be, then feel free to outrage on, but I think that's pretty lamentable.

The fervor over this issue seems to be predicated on the belief that what appears on twitter is the only set of events that lead up to him being disinvited, which cannot be demonstrated and conflicts with Nodevember's statement on the issue.

> This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.

Yes, I think anyone who has come to the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment is actually making things up, since there isn't enough evidence to draw that conclusion.

> Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.

I'm implying he should at least be the first person to be bothered, unless the full details come to light. Otherwise this is a lot of rage stoking over absolute bullshit.

> But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.

I think there's a legitemate reason to disinvite people like Torvalds who have a long history of being brutally condescending. And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate. Disinventing a personality like his works precisely towards the goal of being more inclusive. Hell I see a blog post every other week on HN about "imposter syndrome" and how that debilitates people in our community, so it makes complete sense to me that people who are dramatically negative towards others are toxic and harmful to the goal of creating an inclusive environment. This notion that we have to accept egotism and profound condescension in this community is extremely backwards.

> I saw the tweet, my point here is that's a single tweet

My point, which you've ignored, is that we need to take into account the wider context, i.e. "the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism" I mentioned.

> the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment

That isn't my conclusion. I do believe these people aspire to "create an inclusive environment". That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.

They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".

> And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate.

Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.

The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.

> My point, which you've ignored, is that we need to take into account the wider context, i.e. "the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism" I mentioned.

What does this even mean? It's impossible for me to reply to this unless you're more specific about what you're talking about and how it involves the organizers for Nodevember. Also "taking a wider context" is useful for understanding something only once the specifics of what actually happened become apparent. Otherwise its impossible to understand what the context even is.

The last controversy like this I can remember was Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from LambdaConf, and even then people were bizarrely claiming that disallowing a white sepremacist from speaking was uninclusive. I'm not trying to link these events (there's no evidence to claim that the circumstances are the same... though bizarrely the guy who wrote the blog yesterday is trying to link them in some way favorable to Crockford[1]), only pointing out how completely counter-productive it is to attempt to place something "in a larger context" before anything is really known about the details.

> That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.

This is just a slightly stronger form of what I said above. You have no evidence with which to draw this conclusion.

> They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".

Again, on what basis? This comment is from a person saying they'd be in favor of uninviting Crockford if he was responsible for being toxic or inappropriate. They seem to be concerned with accusations about one of the persons involved with calling for him to be replaced as the keynote speaker.

> Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.

I'm so sick of seeing software engineers justify arrogance or invective as though they somehow make maintaining critical software feasible. This is indefensible macho bullshit that needs to dropped. Maintainers have plenty of tools at their disposal for when code doesn't meet their criteria: the primary of which is to not accept change sets. Belittling contributors or engaging in childish invective isn't a valid tool for turning down code. At best it turns away people who could be guided to making productive contributions (and yes, there are plenty of people in the linux kernel community responsible for this), and at worst it scares away other potential contributors who are concerned with their own fallibility and the prospect of being publicly humiliated for making a mistake. Sorry, but no. I don't think he has a legitimate reason for being obstinate.

> The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.

Sorry, but I don't buy this "programmer bootcamp" model of teaching developers. There's plenty of psychology and management research out there showing that ostracism and negativity increases stress[2], decreases social cohesion[3], decreases performance[4], etc. In short, this is complete bullshit.

[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford

[2]: http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/janedut/POS/Heaphy%20and%20Dutt...

[3]: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=2009...

[4]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431911...

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