
A response to LambdaConf's decision by someone who was consulted - exolymph
http://amar47shah.github.io/posts/2016-03-28-lambdaconf-yarvin.html
======
jakejnichols
" _Let me say this unequivocally: Yarvin chose to produce this controversy.
This is not an accident. He is not a pitiable figure who is persecuted for his
beliefs. He is not simply an eccentric functional programmer who, like you or
me, happens to hold a couple of beliefs out of the mainstream. Nope. Yarvin’s
hobby is writing hateful things, publishing them, and cultivating a movement
of hateful people working toward hateful ends. This controversy serves those
ends. He knew when he submitted his proposal that, if accepted, he could count
on at least a brief flurry of interest in his ponderous, indulgent treatises._
"

This is a really twisted view. Yarvin has been working on Urbit for many years
and it is his life now. He signed up for the conference to promote it. His
political blog has been dead for over two years. I don't see any reason why he
would want this controversy, and he claims himself he signed up for the
conference to talk about Urbit -- [https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/how-to-
respond-to-hostile-...](https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/how-to-respond-to-
hostile-media-inquiries-2ce34b7ba8a6)

I also think it's a major stretch to call his blog "hateful." (And what does
that even mean, OP is pretty hateful toward Yarvin, should OP be banned too?)
Yeah, his Moldbug character was an edgelord, writing in the style of 18th
century pamphleteer. So what. The supposedly terrible quotes were taken out of
context and misunderstood or distorted (again, see link above). Much of the
blog is quite fascinating history and political analysis, written in ironical
style. I'd hate to see the next interesting, edgy blog scared to start
writing, even under a pseudonym, for fear someday people would try to ruin
their careers.

~~~
lake99
From Yarvin's medium article, I kinda feel bad for him that he had to endure
all this. I don't understand how Tess Townsend could ask such questions after
she says she has read Yarvin's previous Medium post. She was incredibly rude!
And I agree, Amar Shah comes across as a hateful person.

~~~
tptacek
Are we talking about the same Medium post? The one where Yarvin spends a
couple very short paragraphs talking about his functional programming work,
and then over _fifty_ talking about how his racial supremacist views deserve
more respect because he got messed with in high school?

~~~
Goladus
This is so dishonest.

The medium post[1] is about a specific media enquiry, which did not ask about
his functional programming work at all. Yarvin stated, for good or ill, that
he intended to answer the questions honestly. Your criticism in context is
thus completely out of line. You are blaming a guy being asked about his
political views for answering those questions.

Your summary of the rest of the article is ridiculously biased and unfair. You
present no syllogisms, no evidence, no logic, no conclusions. Just an
extraordinary claim of white surpremacy.

~~~
tptacek
We're strangers to each other. Don't call me "dishonest" ("ridiculously biased
and unfair" is fair game, though, obviously, I disagree). I'll similarly
refrain from doing the same to you.

I've read both of Yarvin's Medium posts. I think perhaps you only read one of
of them. Given the degree of stridency in your objection to my comment, I'm
guessing you also haven't carefully read the Mencius Moldbug posts that kicked
all this stuff off (that's fine: he writes in a deliberately obscurantist
fashion in order to foment exactly these kinds of misunderstandings).

A few weeks back, one of the most ardent supporters of his Lambdaconf talk
(who went on to raise a not-insignificant amount of money to help sponsor it!)
reported attending a Founders Fund event with Yarvin. In person, Yarvin was
evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized by other attendees.

Doubtless, Yarvin would respond by objecting to the concept of race, or to the
assertion that "suitability for slavery" is a bad thing, or that intelligence
is generally a good thing, or by juxtaposing some ridiculous bit of pop
culture ("do you believe in the Holocaust? Well, I mean, you're saying the
Holocaust as portrayed in Inglorious Basterds...?") against the circumstances
of Epictetus, or whatever the fuck else is in his tiresome bag of rhetorical
tricks.

People aren't making this stuff up about him.

~~~
lake99
To prevent ambiguity, these are the posts I read:

[1] [https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/how-to-respond-to-
hostile-...](https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/how-to-respond-to-hostile-
media-inquiries-2ce34b7ba8a6)

[2] [https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-
lam...](https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-
anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d)

I have not read Mencius Moldbug posts, and I don't think I'll do so in the
foreseeable future. Chalk it up to a lack of interest.

> In person, Yarvin was evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized
> by other attendees.

I would like to judge this for myself. It's not personal; I won't take _anyone
's_ word for it. I'm not the same race as Yarvin. I'm Indian. Being a
different race, and given India's history, I think I'll be sensitive enough to
racism. And if I don't like Yarvin in person, I'll avoid personal interactions
with him too. And if they ask me after that, I'd still support allowing Yarvin
to attend the conference the next year. The only way I'll change my mind is if
Yarvin doesn't stick to his proposed (technical) agenda during his talk, or if
he is personally responsible for being disruptive to other people interacting
with each other. For example, someone getting too drunk and creating a ruckus
would be grounds for exclusion, in my book.

In contrast to all this, there are extremely well-known companies that are
adversely affecting my life with their abuse of patent laws. Yarvin and Urbit
have zero impact on my life, one way or another.

~~~
tptacek
That is a completely legitimate perspective to have, and I personally have no
issue with it. I gather, from the hyperventilation I'm seeing elsewhere, that
there exist people who are not OK with you being OK with Lambdaconf. I am not
one of those people, and generally would not want to hang out with those
people either.

~~~
Goladus
> I gather, from the hyperventilation I'm seeing elsewhere

I suspect a lot of the people "hyperventilating" are legitimately scared by
social justice activism.

I look at Yarvin and see a guy who wrote a blog for 7 years as a creative,
intellectual, philosophical outlet. Some of his ideas are controversial and
some are just weird. Paul Graham paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne wrote:
_Expressing ideas helps to form them._ If you can't express ideas that might
be controversial then what is the point? I don't see any coherent argument
presented for why his work is particularly dangerous, threatening, or
otherwise worth punishing him individually for writing it.

How would you feel, Thomas, if a very small but aggressive, dedicated, and
unethical group of activists decided to start hounding you? How would you feel
if these activists spread grossly unfair characterizations of your body of
comments here at Hacker News? How would you feel if media ran thoughtless
clickbait hit pieces at your expense? How would you feel when posters on
Hacker News parroted these uncharitable and unfair opinions about you?

If you find yourself thinking, "well I am a virtuous person and never say
things that could be used against me," then you are naive. When twitter
activists (social justice or otherwise) choose to target you, the truth will
not matter. Your intent will not matter. All that matters is whether they can
succeed in ruining your life as an example for others. THEY will decide the
narrative. They will shape perceptions.

So yes, this scares me. And what scares me the most is when people who are
considered to be smart, objective, and rational fall for it. And what I hate
are the terrorizing "activists" who legitimately want me to be scared out of
some warped idea that I deserve it.

~~~
tptacek
If you think you're going to get me to reconsider my take on Yarvin by
empathizing with the amount of flak he's taking, you have a higher bar to
clear than you might think. I come from 1990s vulnerability research. Look
into how intractable grievances got resolved there, and get back to me. To
fully empathize, have all your utilities turned off, first.

Yarvin is a racist. It's not a secret. He couldn't even help himself from
pitching racism (I'm sorry, "HBD") in his Lambdaconf announcement! He's not
exploring the idea as an essayist.

He's also a third-stage guild navigator grade message board nerd (it takes one
to know one) with the full bag of tricks ready to deploy for when plausible
deniability becomes convenient to him, as it has with you. It's much more fun
to get people like you twisted up into knots about the fairness of it all than
for him to face the social consequences of the odious beliefs he's preaching.

But by all means, anonymous HN commenter, do continue telling me how scared I
should be of people mining what I've written and using it against me. There's
a lot of that writing to find, an embarrassing amount here in particular, and
I've signed my name to all of it.

 _I am unlikely to see any reply you write to this, given how old the thread
is. Sorry._

------
ageofwant
Its your conference and you decide who you your speakers are. But I, for one,
appreciate being exposed to "non aligned" viewpoints and those that spruik
them, even if only to re-affirm my biases.

As a rule I object to being censored, on any grounds. I'm going to assume that
all inquisitive open-minded people will have the same objections.

------
tzs
> But then, I think, do I really want to be at this conference if all of my
> people – people who care deeply about justice, equality, freedom, and
> compassion – won’t be there?

If your church or your political party is not full of "your people" then
you've got a problem, because the things that make people "your people" are
the foundations for organized religion and political parties.

That's not so for science and technology. One can be an excellent
scientist/engineer/technician while holding pretty much any set of religious
or political beliefs [1].

If you are unwilling to learn science or tech from people who would not be
acceptable in your church or political party then you are going to have a much
harder time becoming a first rate scientist/engineer/technician than those who
do not so limit themselves.

I recognize that when you attend a conference and you do not have friends
there then you might find yourself having to choose between being alone or
socializing with strangers during those times when there are no actual
conference events that you are attending.

If you cannot socialize with with who are not "your people" that too is going
to limit you. Those who are able to figure out how to have social
relationships with people based on their common interests despite also having
areas in which they have major disagreements have an advantage. They'll have
bigger, more diverse, social networks which are more likely to be able to help
them when they need it.

This will extend to the workplace, unless you limit yourself to only working
at small companies. At medium and large companies you will almost certainly
find coworkers who are on the opposite side from you on many issues that are
important to you. Take Google. About 1/3 of the Congressional donations from
Google employees and PACs go to Republicans. Even Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith get
donations from them. Are you going to scratch Google off your list of
potential employers because you might find yourself having to interact civilly
with a Ted Cruz supporter? Similar for Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (although
the distribution is different...from Apple about 1/7th or so goes to
Republicans, and it is around 40% or so from Amazon and Microsoft).

[1] With exceptions for those religious or political systems that do not allow
one to do science, of course.

~~~
tptacek
Don't retcon Lambdaconf. Lambdaconf isn't an academic conference. I've been
involved with academic conferences (I co-chaired one for USENIX last year),
and I've been involved with things like Lambdaconf. Both kinds of thing are
valuable and important, but they're also different.

The purpose a conference is to select works for inclusion in the citation
record for a field. The conference presentations themselves are secondary to
the proceedings of the conference. A good way to know you're looking at an
scientific conference is to find the Program Committee, which is the group
responsible for determining which papers will and won't be accepted. Most
scientific conferences are defined by their Program Committee.

I can't find Lambdaconf's PC online. I assume it has one?

Lambdaconf is an industry event. It's a gathering of enthusiasts that is
mostly commercial and social in nature. Its presentations will be cited online
informally. Because many of them are presentations by the authors of open
source functional programming software, the subjects of those presentations
may even be cited formally --- but it's unlikely that any of the talks
themselves will be.

If Lambdaconf were an academic conference, I would have different feelings
about their pointed inclusion of a noisome white supremacist. But it isn't;
it's fundamentally a commercial event. It can't hide behind "science".

~~~
tzs
I understand how the materials presented at a conference are used differently
after the conference depending on whether it was academic/scientific or
commercial/engineering, but does that really matter from the point of view of
the attendees?

I was not trying to imply that Lambdaconf is a scientific conference. My point
was that in technical fields one's ability in the field is largely orthogonal
to one's religious or political beliefs. People can be first rate programmers,
engineers, or scientists while holding offensive or stupid religious and
political beliefs. Limiting oneself to only learning from those with
compatible religious and political beliefs, or only being willing to be in the
same building as people with the same religious and political beliefs, will
make it much harder to become first rate.

~~~
tptacek
It matters because the reasons for including or excluding people are different
at commercial events and scientific ones.

We can reasonably be very concerned about excluding a genuine contribution
from a scientific conference, because that would be a case in which our
personal politics were directly impacting the cite record, which in turn makes
it harder for everyone to "do science". There are people in my field that I
like more and people I like much, much less, but I didn't have any difficulty
putting that aside on the PC of the last conference I was involved in: you
rate the paper, not the author, because you _have to_.

That's not the case at an industry event, because scientific progress doesn't
depend in any way on events like Lambdaconf.

To your point about the attendees: sure! If attendees of Lambdaconf really
want to see a talk about a marginal distributed system by Yarvin, it is
legitimate for the conference organizers to cater to the market by having him
on. Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market
preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

Between your comment upthread and my response, I think you're left with the
trickier argument to support.

~~~
Goladus
This is some epic semantic nitpicking right here.

> Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market
> preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.

It is in the interests of any technical conference to discourage radical
political agitators from using the conference as a political battleground,
whether it's a "scientific" or "commercial" conference.

~~~
tptacek
What commercial event wouldn't want to shield itself from the opinions of the
market by claiming some amorphous "technical conference" status? I have no
trouble understanding why De Goes prefers to frame the issue this way.

~~~
Goladus
The parent wrote this:

 _I was not trying to imply that Lambdaconf is a scientific conference. My
point was that in technical fields one 's ability in the field is largely
orthogonal to one's religious or political beliefs._

You are thus actively ignore his central point.

------
draw_down
Wait, they opted to _keep_ the Yarvin guy in the conference?!

This post says readers are "undoubtedly" aware of the decision De Goes made,
but I was not (though I was aware of the controversy itself). I read De Goes's
blog post about the decision just now, but it's so mush mouthed I still can't
tell if they opted to keep him. If so, wow.

The only thing I don't really agree with here is talking about this in terms
of labor. I mean, just imagine if they decided to only send the questionnaire
to white men, to avoid visiting this labor upon minorities and women.

Usually this logic goes something like: since minorities and women have
already suffered oppression and discrimination, they should not also be
responsible for arguing against or affecting change against that
oppression/discrimination. But if white people and men were going to just do
the right thing on their own, then we wouldn't be in this situation to begin
with.

I like Fredrik DeBoer on this particular point, he talks about it in this
post: [http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/12/26/race-science-and-
shoulds...](http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/12/26/race-science-and-shoulds/)

~~~
theorique
Whatever decision the conference leadership made, it would offend someone.

Apparently, making women and minorities decide whether Yarvin would be
permitted to present was too much for some, since it put the onus on those
"oppressed" individuals.

But if they had just made an executive decision, they would have been
castigated for "erasing voices of oppressed persons" or some similar
complaint.

Under the circumstances, they made the only plausible decision: in favor of
free expression and sharing of ideas, and against the awful "no-platforming"
that the Left seeks to promote against all their political opponents.

------
calibraxis
The author decided not to go.

In other news (of the weird), Lambdaconf now promotes this political blog
which sponsors them:
[https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/716427389350359040](https://twitter.com/aphyr/status/716427389350359040)

~~~
mcphage
Well, that's a sponsor which probably can't be pushed to drop support. Not
ideal, but when people are sealioning their other sponsors...

~~~
calibraxis
At least StrangeLoop's clearly vindicated now. Unlike Lambdaconf, they didn't
stoop to getting cash from KKK-types like
([https://twitter.com/clarkhat/status/682022959830151168](https://twitter.com/clarkhat/status/682022959830151168)):

 _Neil deGrasse Tyson:_ "There's nothing you can ever tell scientists about
the natural world that will hurt their feelings."

 _Grim Dark Future Hat:_ "Blacks have lower average IQs. Your move."

Guess there's reasons not to invite speakers notorious for advocating racism
against fellow conference-goers and their families! [1] (And why one hires
knowledgeable diversity consultants who've seen these dynamics a thousand
times.)

[1] _" It was really quite lovely. Later that day, in the jeep to the ranch
house where everyone was staying, he started up with the casual racism, and
everyone ignored him."_
([https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/606799534983770112](https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/606799534983770112))

~~~
devalier
So are the 52 psychologists who signed this scientific consensus about the
bell curve all KKK-types --
[https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...](https://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdf)
?

 _Guess there 's a reason we don't invite speakers notorious for advocating
enslaving fellow conference-goers' families_

So our standard is, if diversity activists can lie, and make the lies stick,
then we don't let the target of their lies speak anywhere? Sounds reasonable.

~~~
calibraxis
> we don't let the target of their lies speak anywhere

Speaking of "lies": not inviting him to a private event != not letting him
speak "anywhere". (Furthermore, this response came 9 minutes after mine, and
carries a quote I immediately edited and cited evidence for. While fuming
about the Lambdaconf sponsor author's attempt to "hurt" Neil Degrasse Tyson, I
was momentarily careless.)

> signed this scientific consensus about the bell curve

If you'll excuse me, I do not have any interest in debating The Bell Curve (I
believe about race & IQ?) with people who rapidly show up to support obvious
racists and write stuff like:
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10945507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10945507))

~~~
not_that_scott
So, you're refusing to discuss their claim, on the grounds that they
previously made claims that you would also refuse discuss? Now _this_ is a fun
little recursion puzzle.

~~~
calibraxis
Why? It's a non-sequitur. Neil Degrasse Tyson said "the natural world". IQ
tests are fleeting human-made constructs which have nothing to do with laws of
the universe. And to talk of "scientific consensus" regarding social pseudo-
science...

The whole point is to attack Blacks using techniques of so-called "scientific
racism".

(And not discussing racist pseudo-science is merely protection of your own
intelligence. My brief neglect to cite evidence warned me that exposure to low
standards made my own slip! :)

~~~
dang
Your account has also taken a wrong turn into using this site exclusively for
ideological ranting. We haven't banned you because I don't think you're doing
it on purpose, but please stop doing it. It's really tedious.

The enemies who blast this stuff at each other resemble no one so much as each
other. Meanwhile the rest of us just want to get away from it. It isn't
productive, and it spoils HN for things that are actually interesting, which
spoils its whole purpose.

