
“A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop” - jessaustin
https://s3.amazonaws.com/sl-notes/yarvin.txt
======
jessaustin
As linked at
[https://twitter.com/puredanger/status/606663407635283968](https://twitter.com/puredanger/status/606663407635283968)

------
saryant
This incident reminds me of growing up as the son of an oil company's PR man
in the Bay Area.

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.

~~~
leereeves
What kind of extremist attacks a child because of their father's political
views?

~~~
tomjen3
Somebody who believes in their cause.

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.

~~~
saryant
How does shunning someone for their political beliefs help advance your own
beliefs?

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.

~~~
zimpenfish
I have a vague memory of some research recently (last few months) that showed
it was nigh-on impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position to
one they held. In fact, it helped to strengthen their existing beliefs.

But my google-fu/pocket-fu is weak and I can't currently find it.

~~~
topynate
You may be referring to the result that exposing people to evidence
contradicting their beliefs actually increases the strength of those beliefs
(older than a few months, though). Pop-sci level article at
[http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-
effect/](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/)

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.

~~~
zimpenfish
You missed off "nigh-on" from before "impossible". It's an important
qualifier.

------
colinhb
All I long for is logical consistency and empathy...

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.

~~~
escape_goat
I think your counter-arguments are very bad. I thank you for sharing them
here, because I don't think they reflect uncommon opinions at all, and I think
they are too easily accepted without reflection.

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.

~~~
cwyers
This is a slippery slope fallacy. It turns out that in reality we are quite
capable of allowing tech conferences to choose their presenters and to
disallow presenters who have made uncomfortably racist comments without ending
up at the point where it has a chilling effect on other types of speech.

~~~
topynate
I flatly deny that the process as described is capable of discernment. What
happened was: speaker announced, lots of people complain, conference organiser
withdraws invitation to avoid focus on "inclusion and/or presence." Note that
the organiser explicitly excluded consideration of the _merits_ of the
complaints.

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.

~~~
patrissimo1976
I agree with you, but one point of caution is that the NRX movement that
Yarvin helped found has many avowedly anti-semitic members who see "Jews" as
part of the forces that oppress them.

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.

------
antics
I recently helped organize a conference.

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.

~~~
devalier
It would be fine to ban Curtis if his talk was about his politics. It would be
fine to ban him if he did not agree to abide by the code of conduct. The
conference obviously does not owe him a platform to discuss his politics.

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.

~~~
wmf
BTW, Urbit has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer. I
don't know if that was to be discussed in this particular talk (usually the
Nock/Hoon stuff is so weird people never get to the rest), but if
Yarvin/Moldbug can't keep political rants out of his documentation then I
think it's fair to consider the politics as part of the technology.

~~~
wmf
I had to dig around in the Wayback Machine since the documentation was
deleted. But the gems are still there:

"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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20131014210123/http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-7-security.html)

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579542)

~~~
13thLetter
Well, then, obviously his writings should be ceremonially burned and he should
be sent to the camps. Case closed.

------
tptacek
Isn't Urbit named for the Mencius Moldbug blog, whose writer repeatedly refers
to same as "UR"?

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.

~~~
yarvin9
Sorry, but no. urbit, from the Latin _urbs_ == city, is actually a good bit
older than UR.

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.

~~~
tptacek
I stand corrected about the name.

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._

~~~
valvar
Yarvin has had at least one other talk (that I know of) about Urbit, and he
did not so much as mention anything non-technical. I don't see what grounds
you have to assume such a thing about him without any prior evidence of such
behaviour having occurred previously.

~~~
tptacek
If you'll read a little more carefully, you'll see that what I'm doing is
_not_ making assumptions about what he'd talk about. What you're arguing is
that I _should_ make an assumption.

~~~
nkurz
_If you 'll read a little more carefully, you'll see that what I'm doing is
not making assumptions about what he'd talk about_

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.

------
lukev
It is germane to point out that it isn't simply "political" writing or
blogging. Moldbug has several essays that are explicitly racist, and though he
would no doubt dispute the relationship, the vocabulary and arguments he uses
are virtually the same as those of modern Nazis.

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?

~~~
k_brother
Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of
either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're
drawing. However, it seems to be the consensus. [edit: I see that there are
secondary sources — but I'm curious about a primary source. Shouldn't that be
the most important?]

~~~
lukev
[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-
carl...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carlyle-
matters.html?m=1)

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.

~~~
urbit
"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."

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.

~~~
chubot
I don't normally get involved in these types of discussions on the Internet,
but I met you when you presented Urbit in SF a couple years ago, and thought
your work was very interesting.

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.

[1]
[http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/gungermsteel.html](http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/gungermsteel.html)

~~~
lexcorvus
Here's the crux of the problem: Jared Diamond's answer to Yali's question is
not mutually exclusive with the converse of (b). In other words, _Guns, Germs,
and Steel_ argues persuasively that environmental factors played a major role
in observed group outcomes, but it does _not_ argue persuasively (or at all)
that those environmental factors left no imprint on the genomes of the groups
in question.

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?

~~~
chubot
This is the kind of discussion that doesn't end anywhere productive, but I
don't have any reason to believe that those two groups have substantively
different inclinations for playing chess. As others have said, the individual
variations drown out the group differences.

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.

~~~
lexcorvus
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. Inspired by these discussions, I
believe I've sharpened my understanding of this subject considerably. When it
comes to accounting for observed differences between different groups, the
following statements are the only two possible explanations:

(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.

~~~
chubot
This is too meta -- they're not exclusive, but the structure of the argument
is pretty clear.

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.

~~~
lexcorvus
No, the burden of proof is on those who claim not-(a), because it is evident
at a glance that there are at least some genetic difference between groups.
(Detailed genetic analysis, of course, confirms this. Noted anti-racist Henry
Louis Gates Jr. has a whole show about it. [1]) There's no law of biology that
says evolution only works on physical traits; quite the opposite. Therefore,
the burden of proof is on the claim that any particular cognitive or
behavioral characteristics have no genetic component.

 _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.

[1]: [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-
roots/](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/finding-your-roots/)

~~~
chubot
There are genetic differences between groups, but claim (a) is that there are
such differences _that contribute (substantively) to different outcomes_ \--
as you wrote yourself. I don't know of any such evidence. It's controversial
to say the least, but if you are engaging me in a discussion, you have the
burden of proof on that point.

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.

~~~
lexcorvus
_claim (a) is that there are such differences that contribute (substantively)
to different outcomes_

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."

------
Afforess
What outcomes do actions like this encourage? Well, it encourages
controversial writers to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest
the vigilante mobs find them. This outcome also encourages people in general
to say less, creates an atmosphere of self-censorship, and so harms our free
society.

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.

~~~
PopeOfNope
> 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."?

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.

~~~
al3x
The political left in America were made enemies of the state during the era of
McCarthyism. People's careers and personal lives were ruined during that Red
Scare. That is "silencing". That is "limiting speech".

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.

~~~
devalier
_Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"?_

Here is a very long list:
[https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-
bad...](https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-
pressured-and-purged/) 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.

~~~
hga
_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._

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.)

------
yummyfajitas
I wonder - suppose someone Alex Miller agreed with, but who also caused
controversy, was met with opposition by folks who disliked her.

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.

~~~
gclaramunt
In the same vein I would love to see the people defending the talk arguing in
favor of a Noam Chomsky presentation

~~~
yummyfajitas
I would absolutely defend Noam Chomsky's right to give a talk on, e.g.,
context free grammars.

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.

~~~
gclaramunt
Meh, I'm pretty sure we won't hear from the same guys if the speaker were
somebody else, but I can't prove it so I leave it here :)

------
overgard
I'm sort of baffled by this: why would anyone care if he's giving a tech talk?
It reminds me of the Brendan Eich situation. I disagree with his political
views, but also.. who gives a shit? It's immaterial to the job.

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?)

~~~
al3x
There were a number of people who voiced their objections on Twitter. It's
easy to ask the rhetorical question here, but if you really want an answer, go
check out what they said.

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.

~~~
urbit
Ironically, the St. Louis hacker who first suggested urbit would be a great
fit for Strange Loop (hi Justin!) is an African-American.

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.

~~~
nkurz
Urbit --

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?

~~~
yarvin9
I shouldn't post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom agree with me
on anything, have worked on the project.

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/](http://www.unz.com/pfrost/age-of-reason/) [1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676630)
[2] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676861)

~~~
smitherfield
_" Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever
applied to itself._

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.

~~~
riverc
A similar point applies to the term 'Christian' and to the term 'Monarchist'
\- whereas it would be interesting to see the etymology of Marxist, Socialist
or Communist.

'Capitalist' has the same issue, interestingly.

------
pixelperfect
I am curious, could someone link to the most objectionable content by Curtis
Yarvin? I don't think prohibiting someone from speaking at a private tech
conference due to offensive views is necessarily a bad thing (e.g. prohibiting
a KKK member from speaking), however without seeing his objectionable content
I don't know if it's appropriate in this circumstance.

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.

~~~
paxdickinson
Those calling for his removal from the conference cited this six-year-old blog
post about Thomas Carlyle as their only specific complaint.

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-
car...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-carlyle-
matters.html)

~~~
steveklabnik
This is factually not true, and since you claim to have read my complaints,
this comment appears disingenuous.

More specifically, I linked [http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-
machiavellis/](http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/)
and [http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-
monarchy/](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.

~~~
overgard
Why does it matter what his political beliefs entail on a technical subject?

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I
disagree with this. Furthermore, _certain_ views merit more consideration than
others, especially with regards to something like a conference, see
raganwald's comment elsewhere in this thread about conferences being cultural.

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.

~~~
overgard
> Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I
> disagree with this.

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.

~~~
topynate
Moldbug's fundamental definition of Left and Right is that the most purely
Left organisation makes everything political, because everything is effected
by persuasion, and the most purely Right organisation makes nothing political,
because everything is by compulsion.

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.

------
topynate
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'. The same goes for the other beyond-the-pale isms like sexism,
fascism, etc.

I commented on a flagged post on why this is an issue for me personally:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674958)

~~~
ncallaway
> it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and when something
> is 'too racist'

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).

~~~
yummyfajitas
Similarly, if Jessitron (singling her out solely because she wrote a really
good blog post today [1]) wants to talk about microservices in clojure, and
folks want to keep her out because of her views on women in technology, you
are ok with that also?

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...](http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style.html)

~~~
ncallaway
Again, a disclaimer: I know pretty much nothing about this specific instance
except the linked article. I don't know the candidate speaker, their political
views, or anything of that nature. No examples in this comment are meant to be
reflective of this specific situation.

> "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.

~~~
13thLetter
Then it sounds like you're fully on the side of Yarvin and fully opposed to
Strangeloop's actions, since (even when he dared to write about unpopular
political opinions) he was never anything less than calm and rational.

------
convexfunction
It's funny because he definitely saw this coming.

[http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare.html)

------
lkrubner
An analogy can be made here to the famous case of Michael Servetus. Please
note that I am not saying that Curtis Yarvin is the most important scientist
of our era. I'm not suggesting that Curtis Yarvin is necessarily of unusual
brilliance. He could easily be wrong regarding all of his political writing.
This is just an analogy.

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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus)

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
I don't think Curits Yarvin is going to be put to death for his rather far
right political beliefs. That you'd compare him to Servetus is...well, rather
ridiculous TBH.

------
paxdickinson
The repeated kills of previous threads on this topic illustrate the problem
goes much deeper than Strangeloop. HN itself has long been policed by left
wing stormtroopers eliminating anything they disagree with.

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.

~~~
ncallaway
The great thing about technology is you can always make your own space. You
_can_ have a niche website — or other technological forum — that is a bastion
of iconoclastic freethinkers.

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.

~~~
paxdickinson
I'm not talking about the mainstream. I'm talking about hiring and funding
within our industry. If you haven't noticed a chilling effect over the last
few years, maybe you don't have any nonconforming opinions.

~~~
ncallaway
I run my own (self-funded) company, so I haven't been subject to hiring or
funding in a few years.

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.

------
lexcorvus
In the context of views that are potentially odious but are tolerated in
technology, it's perhaps worth noting that two of the instigators of this
decision [1, 2] are respectively an avowed communist [3] and a socialist who
serves on the board of a magazine that literally takes its name from the
people who brought us the Reign of Terror [4]. Should they be barred from
speaking at conferences because people might feel "unsafe" in the presence of
someone who holds such views? Or should we learn to leave politics at the
door, and be willing to listen to tech talks even from people whose politics
we find repulsive? I for one endorse the latter view. Strange Loop is entitled
to its decision, but I find it both craven and sad.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/606219754513264640](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/606219754513264640)

[2]: [https://al3x.net/2015/06/04/wouldn't-censorship-be-
exciting....](https://al3x.net/2015/06/04/wouldn't-censorship-be-
exciting.html)

[3]: [http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-12-15-marx-
anarchism...](http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-12-15-marx-anarchism-
and-web-standards)

[4]:
[https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html](https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html)

~~~
hga
And [1, 3], in reference to explicitly violent European "antifascists", in the
context of a "sorely needed" but inchoate as of last October "tech
antifa[scist]" movement, is "100% okay with that,
personally."([https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/523497129772613632](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/523497129772613632)).

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.

------
whatucantsay1
Interesting -- another discussion of this incident was at the top spot of HN
some 30 mins ago, and was flagkilled.

Is it that we're not interested in discussing it, or only interested in
discussing it if certain people / viewpoints are not allowed?

~~~
Mithaldu
Pretty sure that the concensus is that the author of that submission is insane
and trying to read his screed as something coming from a mentally healthy
person is a waste of time.

~~~
whatucantsay1
I've read a lot of extreme things from both the left and right, and seen a lot
of "insane screeds", but this wasn't one of them:
[https://improprietaryinfluence.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/a-st...](https://improprietaryinfluence.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/a-strange-
loop/)

~~~
djur
"After all, the people we are talking about are communists... 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."

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.

~~~
tjradcliffe
His view is _almost_ coherent and makes me reflect on how I unconsciously
polish the edges of my own ideas to make them fit. I can see him doing the
kind of thing you or I or anyone sane might do to smooth out the rough spots
in our belief systems, and seeing him do those apparently innocuous things
with ideas that are obviously crazy encourages me to ask if I'm believing
anything crazy myself. It has happened before.

------
danhess00
Many people smugly note that the Constitution only stops the state from
punishing speech. Private parties are free to do whatever they want (including
blacklisting the speakers), and those silly free speech defenders are
confusing the state with private parties.

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.

------
frou_dh
> Because of this, I am sorry that I must rescind your invitation and I will
> not be able to accept or include your talk at the conference. My apologies
> if this causes you any inconvenience.

At least give a straight apology without mealy-mouthed "if..."

~~~
kragen
Normally I agree with this point, but in this case it seemed like the "if"
might actually be correct: because the time from invitation to rescission was
so short, it's entirely possible that the invitation caused Yarvin no
inconvenience; that he had not yet, for example, bought plane tickets to St.
Louis.

------
corporealist
Alex Payne founded a socialist blog:
[https://www.jacobinmag.com/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/)

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?

~~~
sagichmal

        > Why is writing about certain political ideas OK, but 
        > writing about certain other political ideas not OK?
    

Calling socialism and racism the same thing, just a "certain political view",
is about as intellectually honest as calling speeding and murder the same
thing, just a "certain sort of crime".

~~~
danielHanniger
racism has killed very few people compared to socialism.

~~~
newuser88273
If you sum over all micro-insults suffered by victims of racists, caused by
billions, possibly trillions of micro-aggressions, who knows how many death-
equivalents you might get?

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.

------
protomyth
Institutional Endorsement versus Heckler's Veto makes for some interesting
situations. I often wonder what would happen if an organizer going with the
Heckler's Veto published all the "please remove this person" communication.

------
twoodfin
As of 12:30pm EDT, this has been flagged down to #111. Some people _really_
don't want to discuss this.

~~~
devalier
I think posts with a high ratio of comments to up-votes automatically get
buried. So I'm not sure that this was deliberately moderated, or it was just
the automated flame-war detection being set off.

~~~
jessaustin
Yeah if one wants a discussion like this to stay above water, then upvote the
post _but don 't comment on it_. But actually it's probably OK if stuff like
this drops off the front page, because it's inherently more political than
other subjects.

------
chrismcb
I want to make sure I understand the situation. A conference, designed to
disseminate information, choose the best talks among those that entered. But
one of the speakers has some beliefs that so e conference attendees do not
share. These beliefs have nothing to do with the talk. So the conference
choose to dismiss one of the top selections, meaning knowledge so etching
perceived as good won't be shared. Because a few people didn't like the guy?
Isn't this a disservice to the other attendees who might have wanted to hear
the talk? Doesn't this mean the conference is less than what it could have
been?

------
ThrustVectoring
We're now going to have to deal with more outrage-as-a-weapon-to-silence-
opponents. I wonder how the outraged would feel if it was, say, religious
conservatives getting so upset that the organizers de-invited LGBT speakers.

------
leereeves
Coming soon: left and right wing tech conferences.

~~~
jpt4
The "No Voice, Free Exit" response: Hopefully right next to each other,
dutifully segregated with freedom of movement maintained between each.

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).

~~~
twoodfin
Sorry, but yuck!

Must politics divide everything in our lives? That sounds like a horrible
world to live in.

~~~
jpt4
The advocatus diaboli is obliged no apology (nor the promotor fidei for that
matter), being (ideally) merely hypothetical, to be spun-up and shut down as
dialectic requires. However, do note that there is a difference between
political divisions existing, and political divisions having effects beyond
the groups of their self-identified constituents. The former, like the poor,
will always be with us [0], differing only in visibilty. But, if visibility is
a no-op, meaningless to the res publica's execution of policy, then is not the
venom neutralized? We currently live in a world of political polarization, but
worse, one's affinity towards those poles has material impact on one's life.
Surrender Voice, NVFE claims, let like associate with like via Exit, and never
be troubled by politics again.

[0] Until humans are so radically different that neither remains.

------
lissencarak
Having a Department of Political Police, or policing yourself makes no
difference. You are still curtailing somebody's right to the free market of
ideas because of "hurt feels". And even if you have the right to do so, it is
still wrong.

------
danielHanniger
All this shows is that Moldbug and others are exactly right about the tech
industry. It is a cesspool of neo-Bolshevist Prog political correctness,
rather than somewhere in which people's talent is paramount.

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.

------
mtraven
Some commentary:
[http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/06/moldbuggery.html](http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2015/06/moldbuggery.html)
The first link there offers a theory of how nerd culture interacts (or tries
to avoid interacting) with politics to produce things like libertarianism and
neoreaction.

------
Infinite_Light
The incentives facing event organizers are quite bad. If only one side throws
a fit then non-martyr event organizers will normally capitulate to their
demands. Its hard to align the incentives without suggesting people on the
free speech side act like the SJ types.

------
late2part
I wonder how many of the conference goers use reiserfs or its derivatives.

------
sudioStudio64
Is that guy still a thing?

~~~
sudioStudio64
What I mean was that I hadn't heard anything about the Neo-reactionaries for
over a year! Damn it with the downvotes!

