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Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

It's in scenarios like these that in spite of the slow & tedious peer review process I am thankful that IEEE / ACM research conferences exist. Those are the places that truly strive to be inclusive by enforcing peer review and often double blind processes, where technical merit alone being the deciding factor. There are no calls to disinvite authors because of the beliefs held by them. Researchers from China, Russia, Middle east who likely do not subscribe to the same "progressive" ideas, can still participate purely on basis of the technical merit of their work. That to me is real inclusivity.

These new "cons" with their long list of rules are not about inclusivity but rather about imposing cultural hegemony.

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An IEEE conference is a peer-reviewed academic conference whose proceedings are intended to help build the cite record for its field.

Academic conferences might have an invited talk, and/or an invited keynote. But that's it. Everything else will be workmanlike research advancing the state of the art of its field. Usually: real advances in the state of the art, not new formulations of well-established science. Most of it, especially to outsiders to the field, will be small-bore stuff; recall the PhD comic where the contribution made by a single PhD thesis is just a pimple on a gigantic sphere. You don't get thousands of people to sign up for a conference full of small-bore contributions, or even negative results. You get professional researchers to attend.

The kinds of conferences these inclusion controversies arise at are not the same breed. They're networking and entertainment events. Even the selective "invite-only" ones are trying to fill a quota of attendees. They have sponsors. Speakers are chosen based on excitement factor and name recognition. Most of the talks at something like Nodevember --- in fact, maybe all of the talks --- aren't going to move the state of the art forward at all; they're instead going to be (occasionally interesting) re-applications of the existing state of the art.

And that's fine! That doesn't make these events bad.

It does, however, call into question the standards needed for selecting speakers. In particular: we shouldn't pretend that merit-only selection is going to clear away misunderstandings and bias from a conference like Nodevember or LambdaConf or Strange Loop. Because what does "merit" really mean at conference whose presentations range from (say) an engineering talk on kernel programming with Haskell to the release notes for a new edition of Scala to what it's like to ship web apps in Elm?

Double blind makes plenty of sense for determining merit of papers.

Does it also make sense when selecting a speaker? These are often people chosen because of their public reputation for something they've accomplished, often uniquely identified as "inventor of X," and each usually come with their own off-topic oddities that need to be overlooked if you want to hear their on-topic thoughts.

What's the right process here?

I think the right process here is being a grown up.

"off-topic oddities" is another name of "being a person", how sad is the fact someone goes to a conference and demands the speaker to be a one-dimensional deliverer of the topic they subscribed to and most of the cases already agree 100% ( not 99% )

These kind of people always existed, the fact that organizations fold so easily to them is news to me.

> Those are the places that truly strive to be inclusive [...] where technical merit alone being the deciding factor.

This is not "striving to be inclusive", it's "striving to be technical". Which is a good thing for technical conference.

You don't want to include minority just to include minority, you want to have best talks possible without regard of being given by minority or not.

Having someone other than the typical speaker on stage actually has enormous value. It's not true that there is an objective way to judge the value, even the technical value, of a presentation, particularly before it is given. So while saying "we want the best technical talks" sounds good, refusing to consider other factors actually works against minorities who -- no matter how blind and merit-based _your_ approval process may be -- often face innumerable other disadvantages in getting to where they are, including an overwhelming lack of role models in places like technical conferences.

On the one hand I agree with you: some people face disadvantages and don't see role models, in tech conferences and other contexts, like actual jobs.

On the other hand that isn't fixed by buckling to vague accusations, attempts to ostracize supposed offenders, or enforcing rules of behavior that restrict who people are. Bias and exclusivity are real problems in tech conferences, in the industry as a whole, and in real life. Changing social norms has to be an organic process, not a battle of grievances and petty punishments and social media smearing.

I've been to conferences where people I don't want to listen to are speaking. I just don't go to their presentations. I'd like to think that when I pay to attend a conference the speakers and topics are chosen for relevance and quality. I'd also like to believe that everyone has an equal chance to get on the speaker list, by considering what they have to offer and how well they can present it, and not considering their personal disadvantages. We all have personal disadvantages, and favoring some over others changes worthwhile goals (respect, opportunity, inclusion) into bickering and vindictiveness.

If you try to balance speakers racially, you'll run into the problem that we often deliberately discriminate against certain minorities (usually the Chinese) in order to raise the technical value of talks by making sure the speaker can speak English clearly. In nearly all colleges, teachers and TAs in college must prove proficiency in speaking English before they can be hired to teach a class. This deliberately discriminates against foreigners who don't speak English well enough, or whose accents are too thick, for the students to understand.

Discrimination is not always bad. Discrimination is the morally-neutral act of comparing things on some criteria. Additional context is required to determine whether it is a bad use of discrimination. We should not strive to be inclusive of people who speak the conference language poorly, or, say, people who are crazy. Kevin's blog expressed concern over how to be inclusive of the mentally ill when choosing speakers. Was he joking? I don't know anymore.

tl;dr. Life's not fair. The sooner you get over the idea that it should be, the better.

Oh, there is a huge difference between the objective fact "Life's not fair" and the belief that it shouldn't be. No matter what your definition of fairness is.

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