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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

While I’m not convinced Urbit is a good idea, its extreme arcanity actually has a pretty solid justification: keeping out entryist parasites. It’s extremely difficult to fake Urbit expertise to Urbit insiders, so you can’t pull the parasitic move of entering a tech community with little/no relevant experience and becoming a “developer evangelist” or “industry advocate” or whatever other bullshit positions people use to subvert tech communities with entryist politics, corporate control, etc.

This was described in a pre-Urbit blog post by Yarvin. Something along the lines of “personal computing in 2020”.

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"I'm going to rename 5 to 4 and 4 to 5. If you can't keep that straight when dealing with this community, but not the rest of the world, it proves you're an incompetent dilettante and we can safely ignore you."

Yes, very reasonable.

A) It's not (only) about competency; it's about objective alignment.

B) You have the logical entailment flipped. Know arcana => in-group. ¬ in-group => ¬ know arcana. It's designed to reject out-group members efficiently, even at the cost of a high false positive rate.

Eternal September sucks, but Urbit has traded "ability to ever be relevant or gain significant momentum" for "no eternal September". It doesn't strike me as a pragmatic choice, then again Urbit is prehaps better viewed as an art project pursuing the ultimate navel-gazing extremes of NIH syndrome, and when viewed in that light the choices they make start to make a lot more sense to me.

As someone who can't stand Yarvin and suspects that Urbit's obscurity is a manipulative tactic to dress up ideas that might not seem so interesting (and a product that might not seem so attractive) if they were easily accessible, I still find this comment interesting. Right or wrong, it has some plausibility, and I don't see why it should be buried.

> it has some plausibility

I think talking about 'entryist parasites' and 'urbit insiders shielding themselves from people wanting in', is on its face pretty obviously cringeworthy.

Like, is that a problem that Urbit has, hordes of people at the door wanting to jump in, like some coveted nightclub?

William Gibson called this very aptly anti-marketing in his Blue Ant trilogy, and like you point out in your first sentence, it's nothing but a manipulative tactic by people who want to inflate the value of what they're selling by making it artificially scarce and exotic.

You may well be right on this point. But I'm still too ignorant of Urbit to be sure that it's simply pretentious (and fundamentally unimportant except as a fundraiser), rather than a sincere attempt to further Yarvin's political project. His political writing is manipulative, but I think at some level he genuinely means it, and it has influenced a lot of people. And while he plays the character of an outsider genius in a very annoying way, in reality he is clearly at least quite smart. I have no idea how Urbit is supposed to help bring about his neoreactionary utopia, but I worry that dismissing it out of hand might be too complacent. Some of the weirdness could be genuinely strategic, rather than purely the marketing arm of a scam/hype-trap.

On the flipside, Any Community that fails to gatekeep sufficiently ceases to exist once it gains traction. The flood of entrants rapidly replaces whatever was there before via sheer weight of numbers.

> is that a problem that Urbit has

Yarvin's goal was to preempt this issue before it might become a problem.

Don't get mad at me for explaining this - I'm not even convinced any of this makes sense. I'm just articulating Yarvin's arguments.

I'm not "selling" anything. I don't have any stake in Urbit.

Is this an actual thing that happens / can you point to an example of a tech community getting taken over by someone who lacks expertise in the subject?

The projects I think of as overly subject to corporate control (the Linux kernel, for instance) had the existing technical leadership voluntarily submit themselves to that corporate control, because it suited their desires.

If what you're really trying to say is "It keeps out the SJWs," you have no guarantee that being an SJW is anticorrelated with technical expertise, and there are several highly technically competent SJWs. So you leave yourself vulnerable to a small number of folks who are willing to learn the terminology and develop genuine expertise and then take over consensus in the project, because you've arranged things so that there are so few people deeply involved in the project in the first place.

I don't think he's saying just keep out the sjws. Note that he's aiming it at the "advocates" and other such non technical roles, which he deems as gritfters/parasites.

To what end? Again, is there an example of a project made worse by having "advocates" / "non-technical" involvement?

Funny you bring up the Linux kernel, which has been completely subverted by the likes of Intel and RHEL. Linus was forced out using a slightly unorthodox strategy because his natural disagreeability was an effective defense against traditional subversion strategies. In any case, the strategy adopted by Urbit would probably have worked to protect Linux development from this takeover, but may also have hindered adoption to a degree that Linux would never have come to dominate.

This is the official justification. There exists an alternative explanation: it's a filter to keep the gullible. Scammers use similar techniques like making you watch a lengthy movie to get to the actual pitch.

"Gurdjieff was a magnificent old rascal, who lived a joyous life, and most of his disciples live extremely restricted, rigid, and serious lives -- because the object of Gurdjieff's method was to weed out those who understood from those who do not, and those who understood went away and those who did not understand remained."

I don't think this should be downvoted because the info is pertinent to the philosophy of Urbit.

The conclusion Yarvin draws is so stupid IMO but people should know how much of a gatekeeper he desires to be with this platform.

This is the link to the blog post: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/personal-cl...

Except Urbit is a very corporatist project no?

Really? How do you figure?

Because you got to pay to be a "full citizen" as it's called. https://urbit.org/using/install/

Hmm, paying to become a citizen...where have I seen that before?

I looked the name you mentioned up and found nothing. If you remember what the post is called, I'd be interested. I tend to enjoy Yarvin's writing.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/personal-cl...

Entryism in the Urbit community is tremendously easy; all you have to do is whine about entryism and maybe throw up a Quilette link if anyone doubts you.

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