> You're presenting a false dichotomy, being either 'political maelstrom' or 'zero politics'.
No, I'm presenting a distinction between a technical talk and a political talk.
> You're misreading me totally if you think I'm saying it's impossible to have a seminar without political volatility
But you apparently think that it's impossible to have a seminar without political volatility if Curtis Yarvin gives a technical talk and never mentions his political views once. That seems both unreasonable and stupid to me.
> If the conference organisers don't want to be associated with a technically proficient but politically bigoted speaker, why should they be shamed into accepting the speaker?
Because they're stupid to exclude him based on his political views when he has something technically valuable to contribute and isn't going to talk about his political views, only about the technical issues. Sure, it's their conference, so they get to decide who speaks; but that doesn't mean their decision about who gets to speak is automatically a smart one. The conference is supposed to be about technical issues; if you exclude people with technically valuable contributions based on their political views, when they don't even intend to talk about those views, you're reducing the technical value of the conference. What kind of sense does that make? And why shouldn't people who are interested in the technical value of the conference express their opinion that the conference organizers are making a stupid decision that reduces that technical value?
> How, then, are organisers meant to invite on seminar-merit-free-of-reputation?
By asking the speakers in general terms what they propose to talk about. You don't need a word by word transcript of a speaker's talk to know whether he's going to talk about a technical subject or about his political views.
No, I'm presenting a distinction between a technical talk and a political talk.
> You're misreading me totally if you think I'm saying it's impossible to have a seminar without political volatility
But you apparently think that it's impossible to have a seminar without political volatility if Curtis Yarvin gives a technical talk and never mentions his political views once. That seems both unreasonable and stupid to me.
> If the conference organisers don't want to be associated with a technically proficient but politically bigoted speaker, why should they be shamed into accepting the speaker?
Because they're stupid to exclude him based on his political views when he has something technically valuable to contribute and isn't going to talk about his political views, only about the technical issues. Sure, it's their conference, so they get to decide who speaks; but that doesn't mean their decision about who gets to speak is automatically a smart one. The conference is supposed to be about technical issues; if you exclude people with technically valuable contributions based on their political views, when they don't even intend to talk about those views, you're reducing the technical value of the conference. What kind of sense does that make? And why shouldn't people who are interested in the technical value of the conference express their opinion that the conference organizers are making a stupid decision that reduces that technical value?
> How, then, are organisers meant to invite on seminar-merit-free-of-reputation?
By asking the speakers in general terms what they propose to talk about. You don't need a word by word transcript of a speaker's talk to know whether he's going to talk about a technical subject or about his political views.