“A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”
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We lived in one of the small towns in the North Bay. My father handled public and government relations for the oil refinery in that small town. A contingent of the opposition was especially vocal in their distaste for the plant.
An orthodontist refused to take me on as a patient due to my father's job. Snide remarks from teachers were normal (but the school district relied on the refinery's charitable contributions—which my father controlled—so they had to play nice). Parents telling their kids they couldn't hang out at our house.
There is a certain type of extremist who is unable to separate public and private lives and believes attacks on both are equally valid in advancing their agendas.
We were glad to leave the state.
And recruiters wonder why I refuse to consider offers back in California.
Now that I think about it, I want to do just that and document the results. Should be interesting.
Go to Austin and look for a job while spouting off right-to-life and anti-gay marriage nonsense.
Go to Houston/Dallas and espouse the opposite opinion.
Go to Washington DC or Virginia and look for a job while being vocally against government involvement in your personal life and the spy state of affairs, or the military industrial complex.
Hell, let's take it further than job acquiring or state scope; ask anyone with lightly browned skin how they were treated nationwide after September 11th.
'personal is the political' is a nationally accepted doctrine, sadly. In my travels I haven't witnessed much different from state to state.
D.C. is a cesspool of iniquity and filth.
As a good rule of thumb: if you really want the job, do not volunteer potential employers anything about yourself that you don't think would help you get hired. They aren't cops or courts; depending on how laws are crafted state-to-state, they are legally allowed to consider some categories of information that they aren't legally allowed to ask you outright if you volunteer it.
*There are protections in place for the bureaucracy itself, but they were implemented for practical reasons early in the country's history when it was observed that a party change leading to a clean sweep of the federal government right down to the last front-desk agent regardless of their capabilities in the task at hand was highly inefficient.
Agreed on everything else.
[1] VRWC refers to a Hillary Clinton sound-bite about a "vast, right-wing conspiracy."
I wonder why it's ok to discriminate as such. Should one just accept this behavior as part of a social contract? If someone were to say "I'll put a gun to your head" but does not do so, is it not ok to let them be?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/david-brooks-i-am-...
While I wouldn't take it out on a child, I won't want to associate with somebody who was against gay marriage or try to save somebody who was against women's rights to their own bodies.
I feel that anybody who spends time with the people they strongly disagree with, when they don't have to, lack a moral backbone.
Seriously.
Refusing to professionally engage with someone due to private political beliefs will do nothing but strengthen the resolve behind that belief. Instead of stepping across the battle lines into your exalted realm of enlightenment, they will circle the wagons and reload the muskets.
What if Tolkien had refused to befriend CS Lewis due to Lewis' atheism? Lewis would've remained an atheist all his life. Instead, through their friendship, Tolkien brought Lewis over, leading him to write one of the most influential texts in evangelical Christianity ever published.
There's a lesson in there for absolutists.
But my google-fu/pocket-fu is weak and I can't currently find it.
Much of this wagon-circling is influence control or more caustically, hugboxing. If one never hears of a rational person saying things that are what is presently defined as 'racist', one can not make the association of 'racist' ideas being rational (be influenced by them.) Ergo why most people's reaction to some of these texts is 'didn't he learn not to be an a-hole?'
But the fundamental problem is that if some ideas which are considered 'racist' are in fact rational, and considered racist only because people are afraid of them, people who seek knowledge and truth would not want someone to close off this information from them, even if they ultimately decide the case is overstated.
Environments such as this work well when all opinions can be stated but none has the power to exclude. This condition is fragile and exists under tension, since many ideologies contradict one another harshly and some are designed to sophistically undermine thought to drive it towards their own ends.
It is however important to note that Yarvin's appearance here is not under the condition of him giving political opinions or having the power to exclude. One can only conclude weakness on the part of StrangeLoop's supporters, and if such ideas are even in their suggestion so much stronger than their own, they have already likely lost the battle.
In fact, it seems like their followers have tipped the apple cart on this one. Now everyone is wondering what Yarvin could be about that would get him banned?
This doesn't reduce to "impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position." It just means that you have to employ methods of persuasion, i.e. rhetoric. This was obvious in classical Athens, when people heard news and discussed politics in public, but is apparently harder to grasp in our society.
Various comments from the discussion:
> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."?
Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyone.
> Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and when something is 'too racist'.
I'll defend Alex's right to organize a conference. You are free to organize another conference. (More generally, the market of conferences will decide whether Alex is doing a bad job.)
> In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now.
If you are a straight white man, accept that the world isn't perfect (you suffer the consequences of being a member of an identifiable group) and count yourself lucky that you don't have to face the other (often deadlier) forms of oppression faced by other groups.
> My personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work.
I imagine it was a lot easier to wear that political mask than it would have been to change your skin-color, gender, or age. Your way in the tech industry will be quite difficult if you get any of those wrong.
With regards to the "defend to the death your right to say it" hyperbole, I agree that it is overstated. Furthermore, it is true that getting dis-invited from a tech conference does not involve losing the right to say anything; nor is the state punishing speech. However, it would be an error to overlook the fact that speech is being punished.
Yarvin would have been welcome at the conference had he not revealed his racist opinions in [what was intended to be] an unrelated forum. Those opinions revealed, he was unwelcome, without (as far as I can tell) any particular reference to his actual public behaviour. So as a practical matter, if the conference's reaction should be considered normative and appropriate, he had a right to say things... unless he wanted a career.
Now, you may well wish to argue that this reaction should indeed be normative and correct. However, I am not sure that you would be as comfortable with your actual words in another context. We could be discussing this in Russia in the 1950s, for instance, and agreeing that Yarvin shouldn't have kept his jewish-sounding last name if he wanted a career, or got forbid spoken about his anti-socialist economic views.
In such a case, our circumstances would have been very different, of course, and it is incredibly easy to draw broad distinctions between counter-factual racist fantasies and failing to disguise one's ethnic background. But the mechanism is the same, and here you are stating an indifference to --- defending, even --- the mechanism.
Another commentator writes that "kicking people out of your conference hands veto power to whomever determines what racism is and when something is racist."
It seems to me that if a popular arbiter of opinion about racism could mobilize a grassroots reaction against racism as they saw it, when they saw it, and when they felt like it; and if that grassroots reaction probably would not have occurred without their instigation: under those circumstances, this assertion would come quite close to being true.
Again, this is not something peculiar to racism, or fighting against racism, or any particular political struggle at all. It is a mechanism whereby interest groups influence the direction of public discourse and policy. Yet here --- despite the certainty that there are interest groups using such tactics, somewhere in the world, whose views are pure anathema to you --- you are not actually defending the fight for social justice and inclusion; instead, you defend the mechanism.
More realistically, I do not think that you intended to even do so much as that. Your reply at first reads as an announcement of indifference and antipathy to the author's concerns. A rejection of actual argumentation or discussion, in other words. (This itself, in case you might overlook it, is rather far from an inherently virtuous sort of response.)
However, your parenthetical comment does attempt to justify the mechanism, and the comment is notable in that it specifically rejects the protection of actual minorities, instead embracing a "market" determination of right or wrong: in other words, the nature of a protected minority is to be determined by the opinion of the general majority.
A third commentator complains about a sort of reverse-racism burden, in that the "straight white male" is doubly impacted, as both the target of discrimination, and as a target of discrimination who is not a member of "a protected class." I do not think that this is a very defensible argument. However, "accept that the world isn't perfect, and feel lucky you don't have it worse" is not any better.
At risk of beating a dead horse, one must in general ask oneself if the response defends the structure or the substance of the allegedly discriminatory circumstance. I will assume you can predict my response to this as an argument defending the discriminatory structure. Insofar as the response is a defense of the substance of the circumstance, then it seems to be implicitly appealing for deference and calling for restitution, of sorts, in that a hardship should be accepted in recognition of the hardships of others. This is a very powerful and emotionally appealing argument... when made to address apparent discrimination that arises out of minority protection. The 'Why The "Safe Area" Of The [Women's/LGBT/Native] Center Is Not Discriminatory' speech would be the typical example, in my experience.
Here, it is much less appealing, and also misses the point. Reading your response literally, one should infer that any member of an identifiable group ultimately needs to accept that "the world isn't perfect" and that they will face some degree of 'oppression'; they should protest against and fight that oppression only if it is too much oppression, or too deadly. I am almost certain that this is absolutely not something that you meant to say. I suspect that you meant to convey that you thought the commentator's experienced/feared discrimination was trivial and negligible.
This would be fine, as a response, but the attempt to convert it into a self-evident, justified response on this basis is very weak, and I feel that the problem is that you are trying to do the easy thing rather than the hard thing, and to end argument or dialog rather than invite it. "You can see this playing out in video games..." really? Straight white men are falling prey to reverse discrimination in video games? I would love to hear the commentator attempt to justify this view. It would be satisfactory enough, I think, to simply end discussion by responding that "this is ridiculous unless you feel like making a cogent argument to the contrary." Instead, however, you let it slide completely: you even accept the premise. I feel that if you were not intent on justifying [reverse] discrimination (because it is reverse[1]), and instead were concerned about discrimination period, you would not have missed the opportunity to talk about what does or does not constitute discrimination --- let alone missed the fact that this is a ridiculous, indefensible imagination of what discrimination is.
Finally, the commentator who writes that "my personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist, and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work."
Again, structure, substance, escape_goat goes on for a paragraph or two here in a now-predictable manner, let's skip to the good part... suffering.
You are responding to someone reporting a sense of alienation and mental exhaustion specifically because they had to wear a 'mask' in the workplace. Your response is that you imagine that it was a lot easier for them to wear that mask than it would be for them to change their skin color, or gender, or age.
This seems obviously true, as those are very difficult things to change. It is also true that these visible, physical qualities have created barriers in the tech industry. But it leaves begging the question of whether anyone should be required to wear a mask, and under what circumstances. Is it wrong to discriminate against co-workers on the basis of the color of their skin, but not wrong to feel uncomfortable around them if they act "too black"? Is it okay to create a "non-homophobic" environment and then fire people for revealing their sexual orientation? I am thinking that perhaps there are some circumstances where you would not find "it's easier to wear a mask" to be a satisfactory response at all. Even though, yes, it's easier to wear a mask.
Similar to the case of the third commentator, but more problematically, your response is clearly predicated against the complainant because of their (white, straight, male) identity and whatever mixture of personal emotions, political views, or what-have-you that makes someone fear that their views would be seen as racist, sexist, or homophobic by 'Marxists'.
Again, the central, crucial abstract question (should anyone feel this alienated in the workplace?) and the difficult, complicated particular questions (why does this person, as an individual, feel so alienated, and are those feelings justified; do they reflect a work environment that unknowingly makes rigid ideological demands; do they reflect mental health issues; could this person comfortably work with a black/gay/female co-worker [which of these] without 'wearing a mask'; would a black/gay/female co-worker be able to work with them; would the situation be altered by empathy training, counselling, mediation; and so on...) These go unanswered.
And this is your response to someone's actual personal suffering, so one must infer that you do not oppose discrimination because it causes human suffering. If there is a different, justifiable basis for opposing discrimination, then you should be straightforwards about that, as this would be the most crucial aspect of your response by far.
[1] An oscillatory model of discriminatory impulses resulting in the balanced distribution of prejudice floats into my mind when I say this.
Now compare my invocation elsewhere in this thread of the spectre of an anti-Zionist boycott: the complaints would be of a very similar nature, including references to 'racism', the number of complainants could be quite large, particularly if there was an organised attempt to find them (there is in fact a very considerable degree of organisation for anti-Zionist boycotts), and the strength of feeling would be equally high. Therefore it is only a matter of time at this point until Israelis are prevented from attending conferences like Strange Loop, as indeed we already are in much of the world.
I note in passing that those who favour excluding Yarvin have yet actually to state their opposition to this sort of thing.
None of this came from Yarvin, who is Jewish, and well worth defending, but get much beyond him into the movement and you'll be supporting anti-semitism, not tolerance.
I'm sorry if what I wrote was unclear. I'll took another look at the first section and try to see how it ended up resembling the slippery slope fallacy you describe.
I say this specifically because it was a professional conference and such conferences are important for earning a living. If private organizations vital to earning a living voluntarily censor people for their political opinions, that is equivalent to denying careers to those people, and that is a substantial chilling effect. If it's one conference, occasionally, then sure it's a minor effect; but look at the Hollywood Red Scare and you'll see it can become a major one.
Personally I'm even more uncomfortable with forcing private organizations to ignore participant politics than I am with chilling effects, but let's not deny the chilling effect. A culture which denies professional opportunities on the basis of personal politics is lacking tolerance and diversity where it really matters: for ideas, not just skin shades and accents.
Then again, China took the opposite model and seems to be doing fine. So YMMV.
Huh.
>It's also the case they don't care about skin shades OR accents, on the other hand.
I think it is rather clear that fixing the quoted issue is a far higher priority than minimizing the suffering of those who suffer the least of any of us. It is a roughly utilitarian ethical position to take, and a fairly reasonable one, I think. Is there a particular reason that prioritization of efforts must never occur? Why must we, at all times, be wary never to harm the status quo, while at the same time accepting that the status quo is unacceptable?
What I was interested in, however, was how facile and insufficient his counter-arguments actually were, and how scant the consideration of empathy actually was, even though he started by saying:
> All I long for is logical consistency and empathy...
I think my mini-essay would have been greatly improved if I had thought to address that directly.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but a lot of people confuse Free Speech, the ideal, with Free Speech, the legal right. A lot of people get upset when people are fired or ostracized for their political positions. Even when it doesn't involve the government and isn't protected. E.g. a lot of people were fired or ostracized for being communists in the 50s.
The rest of your comment is just "other people's problem's are worse than yours, so you don't have any right to complain".
Since it is apparently not obvious to many people, I'd just like to point out that amongst conference organizers, it is an extremely common belief that your primary responsibility is to deliver a good conference experience to your conference-goers. This is not just a belief StrangeLoop holds -- it is a belief that many beloved tech conferences have (e.g., PyCon), and if you think this can't happen at your conference, you are likely in for a surprise when/if something rough happens to that venue.
In fact, this claim is stronger than you might think. This belief is prominently reflected in pretty much every decision every conference makes. People choose codes of conduct to deliberately exclude some people and certain behavior. They make you "apply" to go to their conferences so that they can hand-pick attendees to fit whatever criteria they have for their crowds (e.g., xoxo). People select talks and their speakers to fit profiles they want.
And so on.
I can name on my hand the number of people I've met who organize conferences, who believe their job is to provide a fair platform ideas. It's just not the way people seem to think.
But his talk was about Urbit, not about his politics, and Urbit is a genuinely fascinating piece of technology. Even if the project fails, by studying it, I have learned a lot of ideas that I have applied to my own programming.
So there are two big issues with the ban. First, Alex made the conference worse for all those who cared about technology and not politics. Second, he's given the PC-police a scalp. This will make it much harder for anyone to write good-faith but politically incorrect critiques even under a pseudonym, for fear that it could harm career prospects in the future. And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them? Most solutions to our problems are outside the Overton window - if they weren't we would have solved the problems already.
Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience, rather than the technologists. That his prerogative.
But I hope that other conference organizers do not follow suit, and I hope that true technologists in turn shun StrangeLoop for conferences that care about technology first, and instead attend conferences that refuse to ban innovators who haven't violated the code of conduct.
This is precisely my point: other conferences already have followed suit, and they are not going to be shunned by the larger tech audience any time soon. A lot of important conferences would have done precisely the same thing. PyCon and xoxo to name two I know for certain.
In fact, to be honest, I'd go much further. If you polled the organizers of these conference, I think they would probably mostly say that if you are the sort of person who thinks that the moldbug affair is a great piece of injustice, you probably won't fit in at the conference they are trying to create. Fundamentally these measures are made to exclude people like you from the bunch, and shunning the conferences won't make that go away -- I actually think this is the goal.
> This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend.
> Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
> However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
> I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
— Richard Stallman
My understanding of Urbit comes mostly from this writeup on Popehat [1] and an initial foray into the documentation of Nock and Hoon. However, the impression that I get of it enabling encrypted, distributed programs, does mirror Yarvin's proposed "Patchwork" system of nation-states [2], in the same way that a single root user mirrors a monarchy, and with analogous pros and cons between the technical and political systems.
[0]: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-n...
[1]: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-...
[2]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwo...
"When I worry about Urbit and privacy, I worry that it will create too much privacy, rather than too little. Certainly several services not too dissimilar to Urbit, such as Freenet, have become hives of digital vice - at best.
Only social and political methods, not technical tools, can fight this filth. One of the inspirations for Urbit’s political design is James C. Scott’s classic political-science text, Seeing Like a State. Urbit is not in any sense a state, but its fabric has the regularity that, according to Scott, is essential for the construction of anything like a civilized society. But of course, a basically virtuous society, in which antisocial behavior is not tolerated and easily excluded or destroyed, can only be built from virtuous users." http://web.archive.org/web/20131014210123/http://www.urbit.o...
It goes on in that vein. After re-reading that, I guess it's debatable whether Urbit's politics are neoreactionary or merely pretty socially conservative, but they're somewhere in that spectrum.
Previous related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579542
* He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the next thousand years.
* His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today.
It's hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I said to myself, "Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder if he'll be able to make it work."
> "And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them?"
Pick up a paper. Do you think our society lacks an ongoing discussion of the repercussions of racism? Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending – that people of some ethnic backgrounds are subhuman and fit only for slavery – were roundly rejected by society decades ago. Including him would be pandering to a common denominator so low it barely even registers today.
> "Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience"
As I suggested to another commenter: why don't you take a look at who was asking Yarvin's dismissal on Twitter and inquire with them as to whether they would describe themselves as "thin-skinned". Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event. It's easy to characterize the hypothetical "other" in your head. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?
I believe that I first found Moldbug via a post he wrote about the corruption and degeneracy in CS research: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w... I believe his critique to be accurate. There is nothing wrong with invective when it is true. Surely you are no stranger to invective against people who you think are in the wrong. Moldbug has always been someone who can both dish it and take it. Science and technology are moved forward via heated competition of people who are furiously working to prove that the other guy is full of crap, and that they have the true answer.
Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?
Thin-skinned is not a synonym for coward. Cowards say: "thank you sir, may I have another." People are thin-skinned because they think they can get their way if they make a fuss. Which they did. I have no interest in saying anything to their face, because they are strong, and I am weak.
As for the racism question...I have a proposal for you.
Can we make you dictator of an American city? Yes you, Alex Payne. We could shoot for Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or even my current city of Cleveland. If you are not the imperious type, we could just take the entire Jacobin board of directors, and make them the trustees of the city, and have you guys appoint a suitable executive.
As plenary rulers, you get full power to root out racism, correct inequalities, reduce homicide rates back to what they were in 1905, restore the rotting and decaying buildings, solve the wealth gap between the sexes, the races, and the classes, once and for all. You get to reorganize the police, fix the schools, and do whatever else you think is necessary. We'll give you lots of time. How much do you need? 20 years, 30 years, 50 years? That is fine.
I'm not actually joking about this. If you want this deal, we can talk about how to make it happen. It won't happen overnight, but I think a lot on the right would actually be amenable to this. You win, we lose. We take the knee, you rule. Seriously. You're going to win any way. As you say, Curtis's views were already soundly rejected. If you're going to win, I would rather have it all above board, so that if your plans fail to restore our cities, then at least you can't blame the wreckers, you can't say that you're ideas weren't truly implemented, etc. And hey, maybe you'll succeed and that'll be awesome. Either way, it is better for everyone if we just formalize the relationship and acknowledge that you are in charge.
So what do you say?
More specifically, his criticism of Haskell seems to be misplaced by his criteria of developing useful software, if you accept that the seL4 microkernel is useful, which I gather it is, otherwise General Dynamics et. al. are wasting money. I can't tell, it's perhaps a bit early to get a list of hardware using it, but previous L4 versions have been used in billions of Qualcomm chips and apparently all iOS devices.
And the related academic Barrelfish OS researchers seem to me to be doing something useful, and the languages they are using are C, with various bits of that generated by Haskell (e.g. hardware descriptions -> C).
It's a pity that Urbit now has no chance of greater success, the SJWs of computing going so far as to say it "has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675512), which is obviously worse than the "monarchy" of superuser vs. user.
What a crazy coincidence. This talk was accepted when nobody knew who Yarvin was, but now that you and your friends want to cast him out into the wilderness for disagreeing with your political opinions, all of a sudden you realize that the talk was technically uninteresting anyway. What are the odds, huh?
"Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending –"
Was he going to defend those views in his technical talk? If not, what's the problem?
"Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event."
Not going to happen, because that would be defined as "harassment" and get the asker fired. You guys have the industry locked up real tight.
This is a lie. Moldbug has never defended such a view, and only a willful misreading of his work could possibly lead to this conclusion.
For the curious, let's have a taste of what Moldbug has actually written on the subject [1]. Its only sin would appear to be the use of the slightly archaic (but nonpejorative [2]) term "Negro":
----
[T]he common meaning of racism implies the belief that ancestry is significant information in the context of common decisions about individuals.
It should be obvious that it is not. If you want to test a job applicant’s IQ, for example, give her an IQ test. Patterns of ancestry become useful only in decisions that affect large groups of humans in the aggregate. Governments, however, must often make such decisions.
Therefore, if you are an HNU [Human Neurological Uniformity] denialist and someone asks you whether you’re a racist, you can ask him if he implies the above belief, which we can call racial essentialism. (The Nazis, of course, were big essentialists.) If he says yes, tell him no. If he says no, you can tell him yes.
One also must be quite a bit more careful than Hume [quoted previously] with the words superior and inferior. This implies some quantitative ordering of overall personal worth, an idea one would expect Hume to be the last to accept. For example, consider the proposition that Jews tend to be better chess players than Negroes, whereas Negroes tend to be better dancers than Jews. Both halves of this statement may (or may not) be true, but neither can justify us in ranking the two races overall—unless our sole criterion of personal worth is either chess or dance. Which mine isn’t.
[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-...
[2]: http://www.uncf.org
I think it's still worth briefly lamenting that our culture is heading in this direction. I see more and more echoes of the worldview and tactics that ultimately killed just shy of a hundred million people or so last century, and yes, it scares me.
Do you have any thoughts you'd be disinvited via public pressure from the best conferences for having? Will you in the culture of twenty or thirty years from now? Grist for the mill.
I think it's important to understand that inviting someone to speak does not mean you endorse what they say. If that were true, if a conference held a debate on opposing views, which view should the conference be endorsing? The conference serves as the messenger, not the message.
The traditional way to handle these issues is to have a complaint procedure. Either an email address, or even someone at the event who can handle such complaints. Keep in mind, attendees are under no obligation to go to every talk, so if you want to enjoy the event, you are welcome to simply not go to the talk you don't like.
In terms of the situation in question, by virtue of this action, StrangeLoop has now become a political conference, whether they wanted to or not. I am unclear on how their speaker selection process will change going forward. If I decide to submit a talk, do I need to worry that, after I arrange all my travel and such, that I will be dis-invited because of statements I have made in an unrelated venue?
I fully support the right of a conference to select who their speakers are, but when they use criteria unrelated to their stated mission, it does change the perception of the event.
Of course, if a person promises to speak on a technical topic, and then goes on a political rant, that's a reason to shut them down or walk out: the audience isn't getting what was expected and promised. But the mere fact of a person's unrelated political views being used to remove them from a speakers list - this is the sort of thing that you would expect from the USSR.
How distinct is Urbit and Yarvin from the advocacy of the Moldbug UR blog?
The association between Yarvin and that blog isn't exactly cryptic; for instance, Yarvin has given somewhat recent video-recorded talks espousing many of the same ideas as the blog, purposefully and in some depth.
Is it possible that the most boring interpretation of facts is once again correct? That Urbit itself is a relatively obscure project with very few users and was accepted to Strange Loop as a sort of, "huh, interesting" kind of thing, by a panel not fully acquainted with "Moldbug"? And that once they were more fully informed of what Yarvin stands for, the costs of giving him a stage outweighed the benefits?
Talk proposals aren't binary things. Program committees weigh pros and cons for most submissions. Some of them are so clearly important that they'd get in no matter how outre' their authors politics are. But it seems like it'd take some retconning to suggest that Urbit is that kind of subject.
As has been said many times in this thread, Yarvin is free to say what he believes, and I am free to say what I believe, and organizers are allowed to do what they want. This is how a free market of ideas is supposed to work.
This is emphatically not how the free market of ideas is supposed to work.
I don't think you appreciate what the "free" in "free market" refers to...
Not that it matters, but you palmed a card there by equating holding the same position on gay marriage as Barack Obama in 2008, or wearing a tacky bowling shirt, as "reactionary." It kind of seems like anything which disagrees with a microscopic sliver of online activists is reactionary now.
"Forced to make a tearful apology" Rather say that he made a tearful apology, because he regretted his wrong action and felt apologetic. Or, if you have access to some sort of privileged information and actually know that he was forced, I've got another rejoinder: forced to apologize!? No! The humanity.
Nominal.
There was no big ruckus when he was the CTO for the Mozilla Foundation, either. But when you become the CEO of an organization, you become its public face in many ways. And he had some baggage, there. Like it or not, many corporate CEOs are held to different standards of public discourse by their employers, because companies generally don't want to risk alienating consumers.
Now, I don't know that it was right for him to lose his job. That was probably the wrong thing to happen at this point in time. I have big problems with companies being able to exercise control over people's expression of their political beliefs and actions. I feel bad for him losing the position, I really do. On the other hand, if he was not going to be able to effectively run the foundation and there were schisms forming in the community that's so essential to the continuation of the foundation's work...what are you, as Mozilla, to do?
I mean, if you had a corporate leader who came out publicly and said, "I don't think mixed race couples should be allowed to marry," she or he probably would not last much longer in that position. And I'll bet most people would not have much of a problem. In fact, I don't have to bet about a situation like that — nobody shed too many tears for Donald Sterling.
It's a complicated issue. I'd strongly suggest reading (or listening) to the things that Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan (both gay writers with very different political bents) had to say afterwards. Savage pointed out, very interestingly, that this ouster, while pinned on the "gay mafia", was really something that came from other large tech companies, from online journalistic enterprises, and from inside Mozilla itself. It may just be the first pang of society saying, "Bigotry against gay people is not socially acceptable, just like many other forms of bigotry." Again, like it or not, society does this all the time. See, again, Donald Sterling for a case study in it.
He also apologized repeatedly for offending his coworkers, so it's incorrect to say he "expressed no regret."
In fact, I think the vilification of Eich neatly demonstrates why Proposition 8 won at the ballot box. Religious people were frightened that their religious beliefs would first be rebranded as bigotry, which would then give their ideological opponents the opportunity to punish them. The fate of Eich seems to confirm these fears.
We hear this a lot, but I have to wonder to what extent the schisms would have formed if Mozilla had firmly said that people's political views outside of the workplace are irrelevant, rather than looking weak at the first breath of complaint.
I do agree with you that society does this all the time but many of the things society does are counterproductive, and this is little different. Is Mozilla stronger now that it's made clear that it views half the population of the United States as an active enemy, purely on the basis of their political views?
Those who would say that are enemies of intellectual life. Can you safely express ideas outside the Overton Window, for curiosity's sake, on your own time? No, they shout in unison!
But now, for any intellectual worthy of the name, the Overton Window is narrow and constraining. If you fancy yourself an intellectual and you think that the present Overton Window is a big enough sandbox to play in, you are not very much of an intellectual. If noting (for instance) that different people are different is outside of the Overton Window, the sandbox is tiny indeed.
The initials are somehow very compelling - another couple of great literary UR blogs are the Unz Review (unz.com) and Uncouth Reflections (uncouthreflections.com).
I will admit that urbit has very few users, as technically we're really not launched at all. We were thinking Strange Loop might be a good place for this, but I guess not.
Here's an honest summary of what I think:
I find it very easy to see the importance of a serious general-purpose overlay network, since I think that's the future of the Internet, so much so that I think something like Urbit will make IPv6 irrelevant. I'm philosophically inclined to appreciate that work.
I find that the programming model you've attached to it --- the Nock/Hoon stuff --- makes it easy to dismiss the work. I think you winkingly acknowledge and encourage that (for instance: the new pronunciation of ASCII characters), but don't really know why.
The combination of relentless idiosyncrasy, world-building ambition, and your many tens of thousands of words of (to me) odious philosophical writing leaves me in a place where I can empathize with the dilemma you'd post to a conference organizer. Your defenders on this thread seem to take it as an axiom that you'd just get up on stage, explain why you decided to code in line noise instead of Lisp, and talk about our beautiful overlay network future. I'd like to see that talk, too. But I don't think that's actually an axiom. It's seems just as likely that you'd use your network design as a launching point for a 5 minute digression on the evils of democracy.
Later: I just want to be clear that I'm writing for the thread, not directly to you. I don't know which if any of these points you even disagree with.
There is a common fallacy whereby people assume that "unknown odds" should be estimated as having a 50% chance of occurring. Your phrase "it seems just as likely" could easily be interpreted to mean that you think there is a 50:50 chance that Yarvin would ignore the tech and speak instead about his political views. Were you to believe this, you'd be making a fairly strong assumption.
I don't think this is what you meant, but I think it's a reasonable reading of your words as written. For the respondent to politely point out that Yarvin stuck to the technical details in a previous talk is constructively responsive to this reading.
If a reader doesn't interpret something you've written in the way you intended it's possible (but not "just as likely") that the reader is not the one at fault. Telling them to "read a little more carefully" is being unnecessarily rude to someone who was contributing useful information.
I bet you actually think "your team" won something just now. But the only thing you've done is ensured you go down in history as the immature fuckwits you sadly are.
I'm OVERJOYED that you are personally too stupid to understand what his code is good for. This guy is like a gold coin laying on the sidewalk, being constantly trampled underfoot, which nobody is smart enough to bend down and pick up.
Without y'all making him into a martyr, we'd likely have never heard of him, or his project....and the future might have been a very different place. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being an unimaginative, clueless, self-absorbed asshat.
We just so happen to have a use for his invention that will make him a multi-millionaire in short order. You'll be reading about Mr. Yarvin in the magazines in a few years.
You may want to reflect on what is so seriously wrong with your way of thinking about the world that it causes you to fail, time and time again, to appreciate and respect genius when you see it.
Could it be your massively overinflated ego and sense of self-worth?
Maybe you're not the special little shit you've always imagined yourself to be.
Could it be because you have spent your entire life searching for something to be pissed off and offended about, and thinking of about how you can rank up in society and step on others to do it?
Maybe it's because you're busy doing anything and everything but what the geniuses are doing: studying technology, and thinking new thoughts.
How many new words and concepts have YOU invented, you judgmental prick?
Nathan Klein
(Remember that name.)
What follows don't really resemble "thoughts." Maybe the word does not mean what you think it means.
It's too bad cause I think urbit it super-interesting, and even the weirdness surrounding the blogs (I came across later) were also super-interesting (but I don't agree with most of those, it was like curiosity-interesting).
I think the tech-conference should have taken the chance, though. Because it is (thought) provoking.
Strangeloop, in the past, has explicitly tried to foster a minority-friendly environment. Many of the other speakers are from minority groups. It's easy to see that having a speaker with Moldbug's history would do irreparable damage to what Alex has been trying to do.
You can still disagree with the decision, but that at least is the context in which it was made. It isn't just that he's politically conservative or holds to some unusual opinion - he has literally written that several of his co-speakers are genetically more fit to be slaves while he, a white male, is genetically designed to be a master.
I don't blame Alex for wanting to avoid that dynamic at his conference.
Call it "culture fit", if you must. Can't he have the culture he wants at his conference?
If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Once upon a time, liberals argued against that.
"Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees unconditionally to protect and support the slave.
Moreover, this contract need not be a mere expression of sentiment. It can and should be enforced by the State, just as a loan is. If the slave changes his mind and runs away, the State will capture and return him, billing the master for the expense. Or at least, these are reasonable terms under which two parties might agree on the permanent relationship of master and slave."
"A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers, such as Epictetus, shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies."
"Of course, like gay marriage (or ordinary marriage), slavery is not without its abuses. When we think of the word 'slavery,' we think of these abuses. Thus, by defining the word as intrinsically abusive, like marriages in which one party beats the other, we can conveniently define away all the instances of slavery (or, for that matter, marriage) in which the relationship is functional."
I mean, if those are not actually supporting slavery, it seems to be only because he takes care to voice a lot of pro-slavery rhetoric without actually crossing that line.
His actual view seems to be that it should be legal for a person to sign a permanent, life-long employment contract, mediated and regulated for abuse by the state, where the person gets a guaranteed wage in return for having to provide labor. The idea is that for the lower end of the bell curve, this is a lot more humane than subjecting someone to the capriciousness of the capitalist system, where a person can be fired at will. Note that some on the left have made the same argument. There was a leftist critique of the end of serfdom in Eastern Europe, by which they accused the end of serfdom of being a greedy power-play by the feudal lords, who wished to renege on their obligations to provide for the serfs. Does this view make Moldbug evil?
Carlyle's take† is distilled utilitarianism. The blacks in the West Indies are lazy and stupid. The English are not. The climate in the West Indies is such that a black person living there need not work at all; they can simply pluck their food off the vines. The English are starving. Left to their own devices, the black people will revert to a state of nature, killing each other in an atavistic reversion to a primal jungle. At least under slavery, they can be watched over by benevolent masters. The sugar trade will thrive. The English will prosper. Slavery is pareto efficient.
It's really not hard to find attachment points to Carlyle's "Discourse" in multiple places through Yarvin's writing --- the references to Carlyle, the nitpicking over 1850s politics extrapolated to condemnations of the abolition movement, the genetic predisposition stuff.
A reasonable person could reach the conclusion that the parent commenter did.
It is not, however, fair to say that Yarvin wrote overt defenses of slavery. His defenses of slavery --- presuming that's what they are --- are cryptic.
† and, I'll trepidatiously infer, Yarvin's (after correcting for modernity)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Agreed.
and, I'll trepidatiously infer, Yarvin's (after correcting for modernity)
Since Yarvin is on this thread, he can clarify his actual views if he so wishes.
I think it is possible to cite Carlyle, and to point out that Carlyle made better predictions than the abolitionists, without believing that all black people should be re-enslaved, without believing that chattel slavery is the optimal solution for people with an IQ under 85. I think one can draw from Carlyle while still being a good person.
I think his positive views are generally cryptic because his goal is not to produce some plan of action, his goal was to provoke and to get us to think critically about whether we are actually as moral and righteous as we think we are. We like to think of ourselves as being morally superior to Carlyle. But the counter argument is that when we try to abolish slavery in a righteousness holy war, we often end up in a worse state of general vagrancy and violence or even a worse state of exploitation (eg, share cropping) or a socialized form of slavery (eg, workfare). So rather than being holy and righteous, we should think about what kind of long-term paternalistic structures would actually work best for all involved. I don't that making this argument makes someone a bad person, or worthy of being purged.
Maybe "approver of slavery" is a less apt description than "whatever slavery's equivalent of a holocaust denier is".
Your response to this could be informed by the knowledge that the Adams reference is one of many others I could have chosen to highlight.
Again, I could just be misreading all of this. Yarvin surely made that easy to do.
Ultimately, my argument throughout much of this thread is straightforward, so I'd like to restate it as we delve further into the weeds: Yarvin's writing isn't a case where people have worked hard to mine unsavory associations from ambiguously worded old blog posts. Yarvin is best known for his writing, and much of that writing appears frankly and straightforwardly odious.
Keep in mind that Moldbug's blog is trying to provide a corrective to our default view, and so Adam's account is his favorite, shock therapy, corrective book in a world where we are already marinated in the view that southern slavery was an unmitigated horror. In world where slave-holder ideology ran supreme, perhaps his favorite book might be something else.
The key question is: do we have a more accurate view of slavery if we include Nehemiah Adams and Genovese and the Roving Editor in addition to the standard progressive accounts? Or do we have a more accurate view if we only read the standard progressive accounts? Is Nehemiah so credulous, so inaccurate, that we get negative information value from reading him? Do we trust his account at all? Or was he duped like Beatrice Webb visiting the Soviet Union?
My own sense is that reading Adams in addition to progressive sources gives us a more accurate view of slavery in its totality. I don't get the sense that he his Beatrice Webb, he wasn't being given a tour by official handlers. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. I honestly do want to have an accurate picture of history, whatever that may be.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
But I would (and have) based on their political actions.
Regardless of how you feel about Yarvin's politics, he's not trying to force them on you. He's not trying to change the way you run your business or conference. On the contrary.
I can't say the same for his opponents however, who as well meaning as they are are too dogmatically driven to notice how nuanced this issue really is. If people like this join a group, they will either try to modify its politics and excise the members who don't fit the new order, or destroy it completely, driven by a belief that they have the moral high ground. And since they primarily work in the realms of words, their primary tactics tend to be in changing and obliterating the meanings of words to control what is being said. They'll alternatively go from claiming that words have no inherent meaning to attempting to redefine existing terms to mean different things to change what other people were trying to say.
The reason Yarvin concerns them is because on some level they believe he shares these same motivations and intents. I have no idea if he does, but I sure hope he doesn't.
Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
As for why not read his writings: why not read the writing of the timecube guy, or those of reactionary christian authors? Because I try not to waste my time on idiotic polemic.
But someone reading the Baffler article will not have the same understanding you do---and worse, they'll think they do.
Relevant obnoxious quote, in a sea of drivel:
In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject, serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner (the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted.
Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.Dogs are the same species, but people do assign traits like aggression/playfulness to different breeds.
You could think certain people are genetically better adapted to cold or hot climates. That by itself is not racism, it becomes racism when you say that everyone who cannot stand cold weather is inferior, when in reality, it is totally dependent on circumstances.
I think people failing to see the difference stops some honest discussion and people go on a witch hunt. In this case, blocking the person may well be justified however.
From the abstract: "Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
It seems worth asking how a paper like this got published, as late as 2005. Scientific racism may be even more entrenched than many have feared...
The only real argument is that discrete categories do not exist. What this means is that for the vast majority of cases, the expression of phenotype A is not strictly linked to the expression of phenotype B. That said, it's quite obvious that there is a geographical and cultural distribution of genes.
Humans are not dogs, our populations are not strictly controlled for the purposes of winning dog shows. Attempts to do so are racist, in that they are (scientifically misguided) attempts to create or purify a race. Such as when your parents don't want you to marry someone who doesn't look the same.
And yet they're 'discrete' enough that certain drugs are more effective on specific 'races' (or groups of people who share certain genetic traits if you prefer) than others.
I'm all for equality. I'm all for being judged and identified by your individual traits irrespective of the groups you're a product of. But this race/gender doesn't matter (or even exist) stuff has gotten to the point that it's as bad as the old christian movements when it comes to blocking scientific progress.
> Humans are not dogs, our populations are not strictly controlled for the purposes of winning dog shows. Attempts to do so are racist, in that they are (scientifically misguided) attempts to create or purify a race. Such as when your parents don't want you to marry someone who doesn't look the same.
I consider politics quite the dog show, and people have been self-selecting their mates on the basis of looks, culture, and politics for as long as they've been on this Earth. Seeing if this has resulted in genetic differences is a question of science, but deciding whether this activity is ethical is a question of value.
That's really the heart of the matter. As long as people believe scientific conclusions reflect personal values, we'll never be able to address any of these issues effectively.
Nathan Klein
My contact e-mail is [my name] @ gmail
Urbit (Tlön) employees can generally be reached as [their first name] @ tlon dot com
Use your own brain. Denying the existence of races is completely absurd. See for instance:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for... and https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i...
And lots more reading here: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#race
"Race" as it is commonly used means "variety" or "breed", and the claim that there are observable and significant statistical differences between human populations in geographic regions is, one hopes, uncontroversial. Those differences come from different genes, and since we all know that a trivial edit to a single gene can result in a massive change in function, it is reasonable to ask about a wide range of characteristics that have some genetic influence.
To claim that "races" in this sense "do not exist" is to come across as incoherent and pedantic at the same time.
Whenever anyone has looked at any characteristic that is really significant in society and how it differs across "races" so defined, they have found that the differences are trivial at best, non-existent at worst. This is "controversial" because a bunch of idiots want to project their prejudices onto genes.
"Intelligence" is by far the most debatable target for this kind of nonsense because a) it is controversial as to whether or not anything like "g" is an objectively real feature of human beings; b) it is extremely controversial how heritable it is; and c) even if it is real and heritable, our ability to measure it is so poor that it is very difficult to make any claims about population statistics.
See... you can actually refute racist nonsense while at the same time acknowledging what everyone knows: varieties of humans exist, and redefining the word "race" so it does not apply to those varieties of humans does not make the fact that varieties of humans exist go away.
Different species cannot interbreed (generally speaking), even if they are not geographically isolated.
Humans are not geographically isolated. Geographical barriers have contributed to the creation of population groups, but these are distinct from races in that there is a mechanism for DNA to move between them (somebody takes a trip and makes a baby).
Anyway, Wikipedia says in the lead sentence of that article I linked to that simply classifying people into discrete races is scientific racism.
"Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races."
The first three actions refer to value judgments ("better" / "worse" - compared to what? for what purpose?). Most people would agree that science should steer away from such judgments.
On the other hand, "classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races" seems distinctly unproblematic. There are different clusters of genetic types that arose due to relative geographic isolation, and gave rise to various differences and adaptions. Obvious examples of these include skin color, hair color and texture, average height and build, and so forth. I did not realize that making this observation, in the absence of value judgments, was now interpreted as "scientific racism".
Further, culture / ethnicity is just a much more accurate way to classify people than genotype or phenotype. I don't have a source for this, but I believe the best way anthropologists have come up with to group people is by the kind of food they eat.
a) Describing a master-slave structure with the implication that it is a biologically programmed one.
b) That some are born for more dominant roles, some for more submissive ones, and then others who are in between or neither.
c) That the aforementioned characteristics are genetic.
Not particularly savory, but also a pretty standard evopsych position. In fact, I'd say that the only truly controversial part is the argument that these structures are innate and predetermined. That such master-slave structures permeate society is readily observable.
I feel like the only "reaching" I had to do to take that meaning from the quote was c/p'ing it out of my browser window to correct for the weird spacing HN put on it.
It's also not an isolated, out-of-context quote. For instance, it's easy to find Moldbug holding forth about the evils of South African apartheid abolition.
"The number of black people who believe life was better under South Africa's apartheid regime is growing, according to a survey published yesterday... In a rebuke to the African National Congress government, more than 60 per cent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule."
Yes, that's from 2002. Everyone who thinks the ANC has improved since 2002, please raise your hand.
While I didn't click on this thread to banter about details, details like this matter in a way - because South Africa is a real country and not a story or a song. In the real country, pressure from nice white people who live in America helped replace one one-party government, the Nationalists, with another, the ANC.
If the ANC governs South African blacks better than the Nats, the nice white people did a good thing for South African blacks; otherwise, they did a mean thing. Surely this is true whatever the names of the parties, the skin colors of the government bureaucrats, etc, etc, etc.
The possibility that, while listening to "Biko," singing "Free Nelson Mandela," and generally having a grand old time, our nice white people actually damaged the lives of actual real people (eg, there are 500,000 rapes a year in ANC-governed South Africa) does not seem to occur to our collective progressive consciousness. It seems much easier to express "guilt" about our 17th-century ancestors than to consider the possibility that we, ourselves, actually caused real harm.
[0] http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/12/1039656168811.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Africa
If I'm doing a wrong thing should I stop doing that wrong thing even if someone else might do something wrong after I quit?
We should be thankful that they didn't. Who knows how they would have screwed it up?
No, the mechanism is a happy accident of nature, that people take care of the things they own. A country with a bunch of rape going on is a disorderly, unsafe country, which is bad for business. It may grate against your idealism (as it does mine!) that the right things often come about for the "wrong" reasons, but I think the parties concerned would greatly prefer it to the wrong things happening for the "right" reasons---as things are now.
Rape maybe one extreme...it was certainly the case that crimes perpetrated by Africans were punished differently.
Same thing for the Southern US ...there were some slaves that chose to stay with their masters, but most of them were ok with the hunger and joblessness that came with emancipation.
Is the question in the end something like...Is a safe and orderly society under a tyranny the same kind of good as self determination in the face of lawlessness? Which one is the greater good? Is that even a meaningful question?
(Keeping in mind, I guess, that these kind of beard scatcher's are the hallmark of liberal western privilege.)
Cheers.
How do you know?
You're heavily implying that one can find writing wherein Curtis explains that black South Africans need white rule, but all the writings I can find "easily" (via google) are about how the current government fails to be at least as good as the apartheid-era government, which is an unpalatable truth but hardly racist. Do you have some specific examples? I'm not finding it as easy to come up with damning examples as you indicated.
I will admit I've found quite a lot that can be easily twisted if you're being uncharitable but I'm assuming you're better than that.
Overall, I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Yarvin is a victim of the modern moral panic led by "right-thinking" folks, and as seems to happen far to frequently, the panic seems to be precipitated by strange misinterpretations instead of what was actually said.
Sure, he advocates for forms of government few people want. I'm not too onboard with that meaning he needs his technical work suppressed.
Certainly a powerful use of the word literally.
Frankly, I'm actually considering recanting. Who wouldn't rather be Galileo than Giordano Bruno? But recanting is a serious matter - it's the sort of thing you need to get right the first time.
To appear at future conferences without my fellow speakers worrying that I'll enslave them or kick off Holocaust 2.0, it'd be ideal if someone can tell me what I have to believe. I'm guessing it's either:
(a) all human beings are born with identical talents and inclinations.
(b) human beings may be born with different talents and inclinations, but these talents and inclinations are distributed identically across all living populations.
Let's face it, Strange Loop is an awesome conference - there's a reason I applied. And I think Alex's decision is totally understandable for practical reasons, as someone downthread explains. If there's a chance of being invited back next year, I could totally go for (b). But if it has to be (a), I might still be all "e pur si muove" and stuff.
> (a) all human beings are born with identical talents and inclinations.
> (b) human beings may be born with different talents and inclinations, but these talents and inclinations are distributed identically across all living populations.
Or: (c) The inter-group variation in the talents and inclinations of human beings is completely dominated by the intra-group variation.
In other words, "living populations" (= ethnic groups) don't matter. You'll have (e.g.) smart and dumb people in every group, and everything else is noise.
I'm not sure how a reasonable person could choose hypothesis (b) over (c), given the long history of hypothesis (b) proponents trying (and failing) to make the math work out for them.
Take, for example, the statement "America is richer than Mexico." By which is meant, "on average, Americans are richer than Mexicans." Someone else could say: "But there are plenty of homeless people in America, and Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world! There are vastly greater internal differences in wealth within America and Mexico than the difference between the two countries' averages."
Perfectly true. But, it doesn't then logically follow that America and Mexico must not differ in terms of average wealth, or that the difference in average wealth between the two countries is irrelevant or less relevant than their internal inequality.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewon...
On the other hand, the other claim (race has no discernible effect on behaviour) isn't fallacious (at least if Lewontin's results are accurate). If there is much greater variance within populations than between them, then it is foolish to make decisions about people based on their race, as it gives very little information about them.
All you say is true, but it won't necessarily save you from the Thought Police. For example, the variation in strength within male and female populations is bigger than the variation between them. It may therefore be foolish to make decisions based on gender rather than on strength when hiring, say, dockworkers. But when people complain about how few female dockworkers there are, what will you tell them? Mutatis mutandis.
Why on earth would that turn out to be a good thing this time?
A confession detailing how you put ground glass into the (minority and female) workers' meatloaf, along with a list of your co-conspirators MIGHT be a start.
As for the "literally" bit, I suspect you experience resignation that few actually read what you've written as MM and instead rely upon executive summaries otherwise known as gossip and propaganda. As a guy whose real name sometimes appears in print, I wouldn't fret it.
For whatever it's worth, I'm on record proposing that urbit may be your most notable legacy, so keep working.
Have you heard of "Yali's question"? [1] This is the framing of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. I believe this is a question that you think people are dodging, perhaps with politically correct wish-wash.
Apparently you think the answer is that some races are genetically superior to others. Jared Diamond of course has a different answer than you.
I tend to believe Diamond, as he lived among various tribes of New Guinea, studied them professionally, and wrote multiple well considered books about the topic. He also speaks simply and plainly, whereas you have a penchant for sophisticated arguments, whether they are true or not.
Let me also say that this type of thinking isn't exactly unique to whites. In my family are various Chinese academics (professors, Ph.D.'s, etc.) In this company, it's not unusual to hear an assertion that the Chinese are genetically superior to other races.
I think you should recant, but only if you have arrived at the conclusion honestly. I think you should also consider the possibility that some past emotional experience is driving all these rationalizations.
To put it in concrete terms: Do you believe that, say, Scandinavians and Australian Aborigines have—on average or at the extremes—identical talents and inclinations for playing chess? If so, what is your basis for this belief?
Look at how superior Americans are to Europeans economically. Americans invented the iPhone, Google, and could best all of Europe combined in a military battle. Does that mean that Americans are genetically superior to Europeans? No, it's that they had access to more resources on a bare continent, which led to a positive feedback loop of wealth and creation.
You can perhaps make fuzzy statements about averages or extremes, but what matters is how you act on those beliefs. Are black people better at basketball than whites or Asians? Hard to say on average, but maybe at the extremes? Does that say anything about which races should play in the NBA? No. It's not like Larry Bird or Jeremy Lin don't exist. There might be some differences there, but they're not substantive.
The minute you start using this to justify slavery, that's when it becomes racism. If you are white, would you accept an Asian person's claim to enslave you based on the fact that their IQs are higher on average?
Even if you accept that intelligence implies a right to rule, there are plenty of dumb Asians that don't deserve to rule over a smart white person, and likewise for whites and blacks. This is a simple consequence of the fact that individual variation is greater than group variation.
(a) Genetic factors contribute to differences in outcomes
(b) Non-genetic factors contribute to differences in outcomes
Note that the two are not mutually exclusive. For example, when you write
Does that mean that Americans are genetically superior to Europeans? No, it's that they had access to more resources on a bare continent, which led to a positive feedback loop of wealth and creation.
you are arguing for (b). But because (a) and (b) are not mutually exclusive, this is not a valid argument against (a). Indeed, virtually the entire mainstream discussion around group differences consists of increasingly strong statements in favor (b), without ever addressing (a) directly.
This isn't to say (a) is always true, just that you need direct evidence to dismiss it. For example, given the observation that any human being with the ability to learn a language can learn any language, (a) appears to be false with respect to acquiring specific natural language (as opposed to language acquisition generally, which of course is genetically based).
So, why is it that so many otherwise clear thinkers fail to see that arguments for (b) aren't arguments against (a)? My guess is that most people who believe in (b) and only (b) implicitly apply the following reasoning:
The non-genetic factors in group differences are so numerous, egregious, and well-documented that they plausibly account for all known differences in outcomes between people of different ancestry. Therefore, genetic factors are probably irrelevant or negligible.
Unfortunately, this reasoning is faulty. For example, there is no a priori way to know how big an effect discrimination will have, and hence no way to rule out (a) without direct evidence.
As to your other points, I agree completely that we should treat people on an individual basis, without discriminating on the basis of ancestry, gender, etc. Furthermore, I believe in finding and cultivating talent anywhere it exists, regardless of background. I hope you agree.
The burden of proof falls on the one making the claim. If you are claiming (a) or (b), you need to justify it. I haven't seen credible evidence for (a). I'm not refuting it because I don't have the burden of proof.
Answering Yali's question requires at least one of (a) or (b). If (b) were false, then that would imply (a). Providing evidence for (b) rules out the argument based on elimination.
Answering Yali's question requires at least one of (a) or (b). If (b) were false, then that would imply (a). Providing evidence for (b) rules out the argument based on elimination.
It is impossible to use the process of elimination when the alternatives are not mutually exclusive. I.e., this reasoning is specious: Why are men generally stronger than women? Well, men lift weights more often than women. Therefore, strength differences have no genetic basis. So it goes with Yali's question. You, and Jared Diamond, are obviously smart enough to understand this completely. But the conclusions are heretical, which is the only reason I can think of for why you fail to do so.
As mentioned, I don't really care for these types of discussions, because either way, it's not going to lead me to change my actions. My original motivation was to see what moldbug thinks of Jared Diamond's work (i.e. if he tries to refute it)
(a) and (b) aren't exclusive, but it could be that one contributes vastly more to the observed outcomes than the other. I happen to believe that this is the case with (b), as Jared Diamond explains. There is just much less evidence supporting (a) compared to that supporting (b).
I think you misread my last statement. Providing evidence for b means that you can't apply the argument that if b were false, then a. They are not exclusive, but at least one of them is necessary. I would assume (b) is false without evidence as well.
That is not claim (a). Claim (a) is that there are genetic factors in group differences, but makes no assertion about their magnitude. You believe that genetic factors make at most a small contribution. You may well be right. But you have offered no evidence for this assertion, and the burden of proof is on you to show it.
I would assume (b) is false without evidence as well.
Given that different groups live in manifestly different physical and social environments, this assumption is also wrong. The null hypothesis is that both (a) and (b) contribute; the burden of proof in both cases is on those who think one or the other is false. Confusing this issue, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is perhaps the most common source of crimestop on this subject. (Not that I blame you; as a crimethinker myself, I can assure you that volunteer Thought Police are everywhere, even—perhaps especially—on HN.)
Of course, in reality the discussion usually goes something like this:
"There might be genetic factors accounting for differences in group outcomes."
"I doubt it, but even if there are such factors, they're small."
"How do you know they're small?"
"Well, how do you know they're not?"
[Caught in trap] "I don't. So let's investigate the magnitude of the effect by examining the direct evidence…"
"That's racist."
Were you home sick the day high school discussed the word "sardonic?"
A way that you can find all over his writings is talk about how people and businesses should be free to refuse dealing with people for any reason whatsoever. It's not quite saying 'I do not like brown people', but instead 'In my ideal society, we are free to discriminate against brown people, or people that don't share my religion'. It's the same kind of rhetoric you'll find in traditional racist groups. That's enough for many people to call that rhetoric racist, but I see how you might not agree.
What I find most amusing is that in that libertarian utopia where people can discriminate at will, you can discriminate people because of their political views, or because you think it'd make some people feel less welcome, and that's exactly what happened here. Having people that defend the right to discriminate at will complain due to discrimination is interesting to say the least.
Either way, I don't think this is an economic decision though. Last year, StrangeLoop ran out of tickets in a few hours. This year, I know they had more companies wanting to sponsor the conference at than they had slots! So Alex could have reacted either way to this controversy, and he'd have done fine economically. This just seems like very predictable behavior given their pro-diversity direction, taken after a few years ago, they had so few women that they had turned all the female restrooms in the opera house into male restrooms, leaving just a single 'family room' in the entire venue for women.
If anything surprises me, is that they didn't vet their speakers before accepting submissions. Rejecting conference talks because of who the person is happens all the time. What turned this into a contraversy is that they rescinded the invitation after making the list public. I would be surprised if, for next year, they don't add an extra step to their process, to try to catch something like this in advance.
This is also a dominant feature of progressive utopias. :)
Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."?
If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable, we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture.
Marxism happened. Limiting speech has always been a tactic employed by the political left. Words like "racist", "sexist" and "homophobe" were designed to shut down free speech. It's extremely effective at silencing any opposition.
I certainly see certain groups trying to decide who can make decisions about a woman's body, who people can marry or adopt children, and other individual freedoms.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? If someone is called out for racism and then voluntarily chooses to exit public life or withdraw further commentary, that's their own cowardly choice. Being criticized does not "silence" anyone.
The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. Far-right demagogues continue to fill newspapers, magazines, think tank briefing, the Internet, and airwaves with their ideas despite decades of criticism from the left.
Well, you just personally silenced Yarvin, so there's one.
Hi, nice to meetcha.
Here is a very long list: https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad... Congratulations on getting the last and final scalp.
The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding.
The left has 99% of the university system including the entire Ivy league, which in total receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. The left also has most major media ranging from PBS and the NYTimes to CNN (although some are only partially under left-wing control, and will play cheerleader for war due to their own profit, not out of any right-wing ideology).
The only way you can define the "right" as being stronger is if you find the left-most country out there as being the true way, and anything less than that as being rightist. A better way to look at strength is to look at who has been winning the battles. If you look at the past 50 years, the left has won most of them. If you look at the past 100 years, overall, the nation has moved way left on virtually every single issue. There has been some back-and-forth on individual issues, but overall, the direction is very clear.
Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country.
I don't actually have a problem with silencing hateful people. But Curtis was never hateful to minorities. He is a good person trying to make an honest critique based on the evidence as he saw it. When you purge people like that, you only make your own movement and group stupider. And that is a problem, because if you cannot investigate the true causes of a social ill without forcing people to self-censor and avoid crime-think, then you can never fix the problems.
And as others have noted, they are now reduced to policing the battlefield and shooting the survivors, which of course Curtis was one.
(EDITED: "is" to [star]was[star], because having been "read out of polite society" anything he's trying to accomplish right now, like urbit, is over.)
I'll defend his right to say it, and I'll also defend a conference organiser's right to deny politically-outspoken developers a chance to talk about their (nevertheless interesting) projects.
What everyone here is saying is that their actions are _wrong_, not illegal. By balkanizing people based on unrelated politics, their actions are destructive to the advancement of technology and fly in the face of the spirit of free speech. Do you not agree?
> actions like this encourage . . . controversial writers
> to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest
> the vigilante mobs find them.
> If we can not learn to tolerate others and respect their
> opinions, even those we find distasteful or deplorable,
> we will reap the consquences, and stagnate as a culture.
Can you suspend disbelief for a moment?
Imagine, hypothetically, that in the world we live in, the one standard deviation difference in IQ between certain races was in fact primarily due to statistical differences in gene frequency.
Would it still be morally unacceptable to point this out? Would it still be counter to progress to point this out? If you still think it would be immoral, how can you progress if you misdiagnose reality? I mean if you want to solve the problem, you have to know what causes it. If environment causes the problem, then environmental changes can fix it. If genes cause the problem, then we might have the technology in a few decades that allows parents to level-up their children. In the mean time, if genes are the issue, then universal basic income would be a lot better for disadvantaged then spending money on the school bureaucracy. So if you want to help people, you need to have a truthful view of the problem.
Follow-up question. If would be OK to hold the genetic view in world where the genetic hypothesis was actually true, how are we to know which world we actually live in, if people are not allowed to make good faith cases of the evidence and analysis for both viewpoints, without fear of ostracism and career suicide?
For example, suppose a bunch of gamergate types were to complain about Brianna Wu giving a purely technical talk about pathfinding and AI. Would all the folks who are so quick to defend Strangeloop also defend it in this case?
Somehow I doubt it.
I suppose others can copy its ideas without attribution, but if involvement in it potentially threatens your career....
Do you think classical liberals don't read "Syntactic Structures"?
Never doubted that
Strangely, neoreactionary and libertarian types aren't so aggressive at shutting down debate. It's almost as if they feel they can win in the marketplace of ideas.
> For example, suppose a bunch of gamergate types were to
> complain about Brianna Wu giving a purely technical talk
> about pathfinding and AI. Would all the folks who are so
> quick to defend Strangeloop also defend it in this case?
>
> Somehow I doubt it.
Absolute and unfettered free speech isn't a moral imperative. Speech can be curtailed, in some circumstances, when it has moral justification.
There's simply no way that a conference organizer could possibly handle those situations differently without being a hypocrite.
I used to read moldbug and I thought he was really incisive for a while, but his blog kept getting more and more, uh, esoteric. (basically unreadable -- it got hard to figure out what point he was even trying to make) All the same though, I don't really care about moldbug's political affiliations in a tech talk, I'd rather just hear what he has to say.
(Also: how many attendees would even really know who he was or care enough to protest it?)
In particular, people who represent groups that Moldbug treats as subhuman in his writing expressed concern and dismay. Perhaps looking through their eyes for a moment might illuminate why a person would care.
Maybe you know something I don't know, but what evidence is there to assume that he couldn't put his viewpoint aside and be a positive force for the social context?
An obsession with collective identity and collective characteristics - all proletarians are noble, all Germans are masters, all rednecks are racists, etc, etc - is common, perhaps for obvious reasons, in the democratic era. And in particular, all parties responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century - Nazi and Communist alike - were thinking very much this way.
This insistence on generalization would seem very strange to most of our ancestors, who would find the leap from collective differences to collective uniformity quite irrational. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey, who governed England for Henry VIII, was a butcher's son. Englishmen of his time did not find this at all strange, though hardly any of them agreed that nobles and butchers were statistically identical.
Also, for some reason which is perhaps less obvious, not all of us have to "represent groups." It does not seem likely that either Alex Payne or Alex Miller sees himself as representing white males, for instance. Perhaps this freedom to see oneself as just an individual is the most subtle form of privilege - but I think everyone should have it.
Since we have you have you here, could you respond to the accusations of racist views that are being attributed to you? In particular, do you consider yourself to be "racist", and if so, what does this term mean to you?
I read your blog for years, and I never got that sense that you were advocating for personal or institutional discrimination against individuals on the basis of their race. Did I miss this point among all the others?
The word "racist" and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s - see Peter Frost's cultural history [0]. If you asked Shakespeare if he was a "racist," he would not know what you meant.
"Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings - a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.
I actually like the answer given by Steve Klabnik above [1]. To call Steve a communist is a serious personal insult, and you can get banned for it [2]. However, Steve reserves the right to call himself a communist, or not, as he likes. This is actually kind of cool...
[0] - http://www.unz.com/pfrost/age-of-reason/ [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676630 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676861
To be a little pedantic, that's not strictly true; as Frost points out, "racist" was originally intended as a literal translation of the German völkisch, which the Nazi Party certainly self-described as. But I suppose you could say that's the exception which proves the rule.
'Capitalist' has the same issue, interestingly.
It's really extrapolating hard to infer this from his writings. There's only one part in the Carlyle essay where he throws out a hypothesis about slavery, and nowhere does he imply that (1) this is a good thing or (2) that any persons are subhuman.
Alex Miller said he made his decision without reading any of Curtis's content, and I don't think that's a good idea. Otherwise any group loud enough could get anyone blocked from speaking, regardless of whether they did anything wrong.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...
More specifically, I linked http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ and http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/ as a brief introduction if you don't want to wade through the torrent of Dark Enlightenment shenanigans.
More to the point, while I'm guessing you didn't dox him or whatever, the fact that he wrote under a pseudonym and (as a person having read his blog) had no idea of his actual name, I get the impression you went out of your way on this one. I don't really care about right or left (I think both sides are idiotic), but it seems like you're going out of your way on this one.
Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and instantly remembered. I'm not in the habit of digging through histories, but when I see a name I recognize, I recall a history like anyone else.
I find that perspective strange. Machinery does not particularly care what end it's put to.
> Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and instantly remembered. I'm not in the habit of digging through histories, but when I see a name I recognize, I recall a history like anyone else.
You try to minimize your association, but you took the effort to get him banned from speaking about a neutral topic because you dislike his political views. You ARE a censor. Frankly I think you're way worse than him, because at least he'd let you talk.
Amusingly it appears I have been slowbanned because of my participation in this conversation. Oh well.
I did not, I am saying that when you claim I'm putting in a lot of effort to dig through someone's history, that's wrong.
> you took the effort to get him banned from speaking
If by 'took the effort' you mean 'sent a few dozen tweets over a few hours', then sure, that's effort. I didn't even particularly strongly argue that he should be banned, though I am certainly happy about the outcome here. I never even directly contacted the organizers, just stated my opinion in public, just as you're doing here.
Well it's a human activity like anything else. The technology itself might not be "political" [though that's debatable], but the attitudes and views of the practitioners will colour everything surrounding it. And Klabnik has shown that he has a big enough personality to impact the communities that he chooses to involve himself with, for better or for worse.
This is becoming a pretty fruitful way for me to analyse sentences along the lines of "the code is political." The interpretation is that if you 'accept' the code in some fashion, you are implicitly persuaded of some political proposition. This is a complete funhouse way of looking at what Yarvin might actually be doing: providing a structure that you can choose to execute, and that will instantiate certain unbreakable rules under which you must (are compelled to) operate. There's no subtext, it's right there in front of you in the most immediate manner possible. You either run it or you do something else.
Two branching lines of thought from here are that a) even as people like Klabnik try to separate the 'acceptable' political thought from the unacceptable residue of racism etc., they are constantly attacking at a political level, and b) looking at a rigorously defined computational system and trying to work out what the deep hidden politics of it are, is rather like the beginning meditator's mistake of thinking that mindfulness involves access to some distant source of knowledge. Rather, mindfulness involves noticing literally the most immediate possible thing, the activity of your own mind, which is with you every moment of your waking life.
OP didn't ask for third party articles complaining about Curtis Yarvin, so your comment appears disingenuous.
I commented on a flagged post on why this is an issue for me personally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674958
I think this is Alex Miller’s decision.
For example, we can praise Obama for listening to scientists on certain matters, than complain he is caving under lobbying pressure on others.
In the end, I prefer to say that it is Alex’s decision. He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. He decided, and that means you can hang the responsibility around his neck.
People who can’t decide shouldn’t run things, it’s that simple.
So I’ll just step off here.
How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision.
Once it was brought to his attention, the decision Alex faced was either let Curtis go on and eventually be forced out of his own conference or disinvite him and strengthen the atmosphere of political compliance. I think he made the right short term choice for him, which is all you can realistically expect people to do, but in the long term allowing this sort of thing to persist will come and bite him in the ass.
The longer this goes on, the more radical you need to be to not become victim to the political correctness mob. In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now. Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton especially are vocal feminists who have taken a beating by feminists because their views aren't extreme enough.
Let’s say that people on HN decide that they don’t want to attend any conference that has a Code of Conduct, because that interferes with their “right to free speech.”
If a conference organizer decides that HN is enough of a market that they tear up their CoC, that’s their decision. We don’t say that somehow, they have less free will because of the actions of HN. Their options aren’t limited. They chose to do something that involved HN.
If Alex doesn’t like this kind of controversy, Alex can stop running conferences. Sure there are actions by all sorts of players in a complex world, but the buck for every decision stops somewhere, and in this case, it stops with Alex.
This sounds like the function of the free marketplace of ideas. One is allowed to espouse any ideology that you wish. However, other people are allowed to respond with their own speech. They can call the idea racist if they want. They can take away speaking platforms if they want.
Whether a statement is "racist" is a determination made by the current social taboos and mores of a society. I think there are a lot of terrible ideologies out there, and I like that we don't have to give them equal platforms. The free marketplace of ideas means we don't have to "teach the controversy" and give both sides "equal opportunity for debate".
Which is great. There are plenty of people who's methods and ideas I so disagree with that I don't think it's worth my time to listen to them (neo-nazis, members of the Westboro Baptist Church).
Let me also emphasize that no one disputes that strangeloop has the legal right to do this. The discussion is simply over whether the strangeloop organizers are a bunch of anti-intellectuals who deserve to be in the spotlight for their decisions.
[1] http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style...
> "wants to talk about microservices in clojure, and folks want to keep her out because of her views on women in technology"
For me, it comes down to how they express their opinions in the public sphere.
This matters a lot. If someone develops a persona known for lobbing rhetorical grenades, making ad hominem attacks, or is unnecessarily mean or negative, then I don't have a problem holding them out of a conference — even if I agree with their viewpoints.
If they, on the other hand tend to behave in a reasonable way, and are capable of having calm and rational debates, then I would want to see them included in the conference — even if I disagree with their viewpoints.
You are quite correct that people can boycott or pressure for no-platform if they want to. Who on earth would benefit from forced contact? What I'm suggesting is that people decide not to do that. Further, that when that does happen, those who disagree speak up about it.
I don't like how this argument generalizes.
For example, I am a strong opponent of the labor situation in Qatar as it relates to the World Cup. I want FIFA to either relocate venues or force Qatar to immediately improve their labor practices. Yet, I have no leverage over FIFA, so instead I decide to boycott FIFA's sponsors (Coke, Nike, and Adidas).
Now I'm actively punishing those companies because of their speech. And I'm doing it purely because it's my only way to attempt to change the behavior of an actor two-steps removed from them.
So, now I'd like one of two things:
- Help me find the lines for legitimate boycotts, or
- Help me determine why my boycott of Coke, Nike, and Adidas is a poor decision
I did tell Coke and Adidas.
I know several people who think they are boycotting Coca-Cola but are extremely ineffective in managing to do so. Although Coke might be disappointed by the damage to their core brand, they might be less than disappointed when you choose their more profitable products as an alternative.
Good luck!
Specifically, I'm imagining a degenerate case where there's a norm of killing people who do X, as well as people who don't kill people who do X, as well as people who advocate making the anti-X policy more lenient.
My point is that we can end up in a bad situation that nobody is better off trying to fix. We're arguably in this situation right now with excessive punishment of "sex crimes".
> "support a policy of allowing full debate on ideas and zero tolerance on attacking the person holding the idea."
If I had infinite time on this planet, I'd agree with you. However, my time is extremely limited. It's the most precious resource I have, so I have to aggressively consider the opportunity cost of listening to every person.
It's more valuable to me to have a debate with someone I disagree with rather than someone I agree with. However, if someone has reached a conclusion that I find to be shockingly suspect ("all foreigners are terrible people"; "protest the funerals of homosexual service-members"), I am not going to spend time listening to any aspects of that person's reasoning.
So, due to my limited time, I'm now punishing this person for expressing their ideas on a specific topic. How does the game-theory deal with the trade-offs of finite time and the opportunity cost of listening to specific speakers?
In short, I'm encouraging you to ignore the crank, but not censor him from talking about context-relevant topics.
Any group almost by definition has the right to define policies and police its membership, for any cause (including irrational). No group owes you the right of membership.
Ideally, it operates like the free market of ideas.
In practice, it tends to offer a disproportionate amount of power to those who are most easily offended, and provides them with a de facto "hecklers' veto" over people with views outside the mainstream.
In the Moldbug case, some people wre "so genuinely offended" by the prospect of him speaking (or even being present at the conference) that they were willing to request that his talk offer be revoked. This was the case even when the subject of his talk is completely unrelated to his controversial politics. (Most people would probably agree that a technical conference is the wrong venue for him to speak about his controversial politics.)
Would most people attending the conference have known about his politics if there weren't this outcry to bring publicity? Unlikely. This was a deliberate message to alienate and exclude those with conservative politics from the tech industry.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...
Servetus had a lot of unusual ideas. He was a fantastic medical researcher, and, in 1533, he was the first to publish the idea that the heart was the center of a circulatory system, which pumped blood throughout the body. He also decided the Doctrine Of The Trinity (that the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost were 3 aspects of one god) was entirely false. Therefore he was arrested and put to death, and thus Europe lost one of the greatest medical researchers of the 1500s.
You might ask, what is the connection between the pulmonary system, and the the Doctrine Of The Trinity? There is none, save that creative people tend to have original ideas in several areas. If you want the benefits that derive from allowing creative people to have original thoughts, you have to also pay the price, and the price is that they sometimes have ideas that make people uncomfortable.
Where 2 subjects overlap, such as math and computer programming, then a grave error in one area might call into question a person's expertise in that other subject. But where 2 subjects do not overlap, then errors in one area do not necessarily bring into question the person's expertise in the unrelated subject.
I used to believe it could be saved but now I generally believe that the era of technology having a place for iconoclastic freethinkers is long over.
The problem that you're experiencing is that the mainstream public is now very much using technology. That means the average opinions expressed on the web on the internet have become much more mainstream. Which, pretty much by definition, means the average opinion has become much more hostile to iconoclastic thoughts.
I wouldn't be shocked if a future client held our espoused opinions against us. I tend to strongly stand by any opinions that I advocate for publicly, and I'm willing to handle the repercussions from those opinions.
If I felt the repercussions of those opinions were disproportionate I would advocate for those opinions anonymously. The ability to espouse unpopular opinions is the main reason why I strongly advocate for allowing anonymous speech.
Heck, look at how much bullshit the Reddit founders have had to wade though?
[1]: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/606219754513264640
[2]: https://al3x.net/2015/06/04/wouldn't-censorship-be-exciting....
[3]: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-12-15-marx-anarchism...
I assure you that people of the right like me feel "unsafe" about the presence of people like them in American society, and I wonder if they've thought about the consequences of that, of their programs in general, etc. I see no way for this to end well.
Is it that we're not interested in discussing it, or only interested in discussing it if certain people / viewpoints are not allowed?
It wasn't overtly racist or filled with profanity; perhaps some people just wanted to silence it.
The post in question was downweighted by user flags. The only thing we did was unkill it so an ongoing discussion (such as it was) could continue, which is standard practice.
I don't have any objections to the way HN works, just surprised so many users see this topic as flag-worthy relative to those seeing it as an interesting discussion.
EDIT: Nevermind. I see this is back on the front page.
The current post was penalized by the flamewar detector, but we've canceled the penalty because the community clearly wants to talk about this, and what you posted is as close to a canonical source as we're likely to get.
This is a core tenet of Moldbuggian neoreaction, that American and European politics are run by a "Cathedral" that adheres to communist beliefs. Claiming that mainstream political positions are communism is absolutely insane.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674643
Here's an excerpt from that rambling, incomprehensible post:
> But, from our point of view here, all these people believing, like everyone around them, that sovereignty must be concentrated and tightly defined, that nobody should have influence over government who wasn’t officially part of government, and the rest of it would be neoreactionaries. Similarly, today, with the exception of a few points of economics, the ideas that almost everyone in communion with Harvard University believes are communist ideas, and would have been labelled as such even fifty years ago.
OK, not everyone can find the time to read "The Elements of Style" but then this comes up:
> Why was Adria Richards lying? Because that’s her job. As some guy wrote, “It’s a mistake to think these people have opinions. They have careers.” Her career was to go around technology events, and fuck them up in the name of women’s access. Why? Whatever is the point of that? The point of that is to create a line of control from political activists to industry. Because of Adria Richards, and the many like her before and since, everyone in the technology industry knows that they cannot afford to upset far-left activists. They only succeeded in this, though, because people like Alex Miller believed their lies—that these misdemeanours against political correctness, such as making similar jokes to those aired in Superbowl commercials, are responsible for a 5:1 male–female ratio or whatever in technology...
I literally can't make any sense of that, except it involves Adria Richards, and why the fuck is she even relevant to this? I'll admit, that previously submitted (and rightfully flagkilled) post was the first I had read about this Strangeloop thing, by merit of it somehow reaching #1 on HN...and after having read the current OP, I'm much more inclined to give benefit of the doubt to Curtis Yarvin. The previous submission did nothing except make me think that Yarvin was backed by rabid anti-SJWers.
Or they all get flagkilled regardless of content if the community/mods do not want the issue discussed here, even if a particular post is well-reasoned and well-written.
I flagged this post as well, because the community interest in the norms of a single tech conference don't outweigh the the fact the issues here are toxic to the community itself. HN is terrible at discussing politics, and this is basically a story about politics.
Don't security conferences attract some rather idiosyncratic characters? Why should I choose one that culls those too far outside the mainstream over the merit of their presentations?
Second, security conferences --- at least the kind I'm familiar with --- are different from Strange Loop. Strange Loop speakers are selected on the basis of presenting interesting and entertaining ideas to the audience. There are a couple people who get Black Hat talks on those terms, but most Black Hat talks are accepted based on how important their technical contribution is. If you have a new EMET bypass technique, nobody really cares whether you're a closet monarchist, because they're there to see the EMET bypass, not you.
I'll take your word for it that Yarvin is way on the far side of any such line, but I'm still pretty curious about roughly where it is these days.
I'll leave it at this. If I was Strange Loop's organizer, what I might have written is:
I don't know exactly how to articulate where our line is on providing a stage and a microphone to people with ideas I find repellent. I've never been in a position to need to draw that line. I'm not interested in spending a lot of time surveying it further. For now, it suffices to say that wherever the line is, advocacy for apartheid and genetic predisposition to slavery crosses it.
Incidentally, the use upthread of the term "Stalinist" is telling. Yes: if Yarvin had been a Stalinist, I do think we'd be having the same discussion, Yarvin's views seeming approximately as far to the right as "Stalinism" would put him to the left.
But that misses the bigger point, which is that the Constitutional guarantee originates from the principle that free exchange of ideas is a social good. The founders believed in free speech because they believed in enlightenment and in pursuit of truth. They were unafraid of ideas.
These blacklisters fundamentally have an anti-enlightenment mentality, as they have elegantly shown. Yarvin's most basic point in his writings was not that different people are different (this is so obvious that truthful people do not dispute it, although the anti-enlightenment types find it convenient for trying witches), but that the modern Left polices against heresy with the rigor of the Christian church of the long ago past.
It is fitting then that events in Yarvin's life should form a well-publicized proof of his main point.
At least give a straight apology without mealy-mouthed "if..."
Why is writing about certain political ideas OK, but writing about certain other political ideas not OK? Why are those certain other political ideas "not OK" enough for someone to be banned from a technology conference?
> Why is writing about certain political ideas OK, but
> writing about certain other political ideas not OK?
What is wrong with people that the presence of Curtis Yarvin makes them feel unsafe?
EDIT: This seems to be the one example that is being bandied about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676625 . Replies to that post point out that the case is extremely flimsy. Give me a break. This guy is a rightwinger (outside of his industry) and somebody didn't like it. What an embarrassment. They're proving the right's points.
edit: To be fair, people are probably more sensitive to racism in America because America is so diverse.
Anyway, whomever socialists might have killed, it was long ago: smack in the middle of the dark ages of widespread racism, to be exact. Which means those so-called victims of socialism probably all were racists.
Imagine you lived in soviet Russia. If you criticize the communist government, and said that the previous capitalist system was better, you would be shot. But if you criticize the government and said we needed more communism, you'd get praise.
If you are in favor of reform, and new policies, and support the direction society is currently headed, you won't be ostracized. People might not agree with you, but they won't have you shot.
But imagine trying to suggest we go back and undo the changes that have been made? Imagine someone advocated reestablishing slavery, or getting rid of women's right to vote, etc. They would be ostracized.
You might not agree with the person who wants to create a new system. But the person advocating we go back to the old system, no. He's trying to undo all the progress we've made!
Society has fought that battle and established that the losing side was wrong. It may have been controversial at one time, but now everyone knows that slavery is definitely wrong. The liberal isn't fighting lost wars, he's moving onto new battles. Where no one has yet been declared a loser.
Just so strange to me that this decision isn't spurring more discussion. urbit-related posts have hit the front page with 100+ up votes in the past.
Overall, disappointed in those who have flagged these posts.
Few consider this traditional recommendation disenfranchising, or a denial of peoples' individual special snowlake natures. It's just a necessary rule imposed to keep the peace, based on an understanding of how people tend to behave. (And by "tend to", I mean, of course, "basically always".) And when people seem to be voting against discussion of a subject here, you should take it the same way.
Edit: Now, certain of the neo-reactos are hyper-cautious about the effects of entryism, which the above scenario would seem powerless to prevent, but so long as public displays of political identification have no effect on the actual behavior of the governors in the NVFE world the only thing for agent provocateurs to enter would be social circles, whose burden of maintaining memetic purity under fire would not be substantially different from the present, with even less down-stream stakes (as the strengthening or dissolution of such societies would not change sovereign policy).
Must politics divide everything in our lives? That sounds like a horrible world to live in.
[0] Until humans are so radically different that neither remains.
And tech is already fractured along left and right lines. Some people are hard-line libertarians who believe that businesses should be able to hire and fire whomever they please for whatever reason they please, right down to celebrating the fact that Elon Musk wouldn’t hire someone who used the expression “shoot hoops.”
Others deeply believe that tech is an opportunity to right social injustices, to give opportunities to those who were previously shut out, and to bring the world closer together.
Whatever you or I believe about this particular decision, it is clearly consistent with the trend towards things like codes of conduct. And the reaction is clearly consistent with the reaction to things like codes of conduct.
Liberals believe that history favors them always. Within this century, we'll see if that hypothesis is correct. The geopolitical death of the West will be the end of this wretched ideology, just as the geopolitical death of the east was the death of Marxism.