"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-...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> We're strangers to each other. Don't call me "dishonest"
Then don't engage in name-calling of people you haven't met. It's inherently dishonest and I stand by my assertion.
> In person, Yarvin was evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized by other attendees.
If this is true, he is no threat and will alienate himself. He will be judged and treated on the merit of his own actions and behavior, without undue influence from the press or name-calling parrots on social media.
> 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).
It doesn't matter. You failed to base your puerile name-calling in any manner of argument whatsoever. That is inherently dishonest.
> People aren't making this stuff up about him.
So you say, but do not explain. The most you've been able to do is relate is both hearsay and simple opinion (no facts). Until you explain, stop calling him names, or I will not stop calling you dishonest.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Similarly, it is legitimate for others to publicly express market preferences for avoiding conferences that feature him.
If the anti-inclusion folks were merely "publicly expressing market preferences" they wouldn't be so furious about how LambdaConf managed to find enough funding to keep going. They're already not going, and they've said so loudly and publicly, right? So why are they so bothered that anyone is going, that the conference continues to exist at all?
It's not about justice; it's about power. Simple as that. It's not enough to not attend a talk by Yarvin, or even to not go to a conference he's attending; it's about making sure he can't speak, anywhere, pour encourager les autres.
Everyone who said they wouldn't do business with companies operating in Apartheid South Africa --- or who (further) argued that governments should divest from anything entangled with Apartheid --- was in exactly the same situation. It wasn't enough for them to simply stop patronizing Tesco. They organized and exerted pressure where they could. Overall, the movement was in some significant part credited with ending Apartheid.
So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend. I feel, as many others do, that I have a right to use my voice and whatever influence the market has ill-advisedly allocated to me to assert my point of view.
Lambdaconf appears to believe strongly in their point of view. That's fine. If anyone's advocating criminalizing bad decisions about conference speaker slots, well, I'm not on board for that.
You are of course welcome to use your own speech to argue that I should shut up, or that Aphyr should or that Steve Klabnik should shut up, or whatever. You can also use your speech rights to find ridiculous people on Twitter and Tumblr to compare me with. You're allowed to ask for things you're not going to get.
Unlike people like Klabnik and Aphyr, who are to some extent engaged in "functional programming" as its own thing, I'm not so much motivated by the future of Lambdaconf. My motivation for being involved in this discussion is different and nerdier. I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating. That's all!
> I'm like the anti-tzs in this debate: there's a sort of conventional wisdom about Yarvin that is dear to nerds and I find it both false and aggravating.
Did you just imply that I'm a nerd?
Lucky for you the d20 I rolled to see if I was offended came up 20 so I am not.
> So I guess I don't share the principle that you seem to have, that if I don't like a conference I should simply shut up and not attend
If you want to complain loudly about the conference as you don't attend, go for it. But once you're pressuring sponsors into pulling out, once you're running a weeks-long harassment campaign against the organizers, and especially once you're pitching a fit about the conference managing to find other funding despite your best efforts, that goes way, way, way beyond mere complaining. You are making an affirmative effort to prevent the conference from happening at all, and at the very least I'd suggest that you own it.
I feel like the comment I just wrote responds to everything in this comment.
Using violence to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Abusing a monopoly, or colluding with peers to create an abusive cartel, to coerce a preferred outcome is wrong. Lying to coercively trick people into a preferred outcome is wrong. None of that is happening here.
If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.
There's a perfectly coherent intellectual framework that sees the divestiture movement as wrong, too, but we're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that.
> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.
That one went by a little quick for me. Some tactics worked on apartheid, so it can also be used to sabotage a conference with a racist speaker? Maybe so, but that's a pretty big leap without explanation.
> If any of what's happening here is wrong, so was the apartheid divestiture movement.
Those actions by themselves are not necessarily right or wrong; it's the reason for the action which makes the difference.
It was right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe in order to defeat Nazi Germany's campaign of conquest. It would not be right to mount a massive conventional invasion of Europe because of someone jaywalking in Berlin.
It was right to mount a boycott campaign of South Africa and call the rulers of South Africa racists in order to end apartheid. Is it right to mount a boycott campaign against LambdaConf and call its organizers racists because in a blind evaluation they selected a speaker whose personal politics, which will not be touched on in any way at the convention, you find repellent?
We're unlikely to have a productive discussion if you think that. More accurately, you are unlikely to have a productive discussion in any context whatsoever, because you will be unable to evaluate ideas outside the context of the man who holds them.
> The whole thing seems calculated for maximum drama.
We live in a culture where people have been primed to go nuclear, not just at the tiniest slight against them, but at the faintest media-driven rumor that some other person somewhere, who may not even exist, may have in theory been slighted. If those people cause drama, it is the fault of those people, not anyone else.
I'm not sure you followed what I just wrote. I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts.
For starters, how does De Goes benefit from generating this drama? Most of the sponsors pulled out and he's been smeared as a racist from one end of the Internet to the other, in an era where that accusation is literally career-ending. Do you really think he decided to blow up LambdaConf in an enormous suicide bomb, and that all the fellow conference managers were okay with that?
I am not accusing De Goes of being a racist. Just because his actions had consequences you feel in hindsight were predictable does not mean that he felt that way at the time. He chose to write what he wrote.
"I'm implying that De Goes seems to have done everything he possibly could have to synthesize drama out of this decision short of (just barely, at the point) actually endorsing Yarvin's Moldbug posts."
That sounded awfully like you were accusing him of doing all this deliberately. But if you think it was all an accident, then okay.
Thought experiment: Your name is De Goes. You strongly believe that people's political opinions or personal characteristics should have no bearing on their professional life; to that point, you made sure to set up a blinded system for choosing LambdaConf speakers so nobody's prejudices, conscious or unconscious, could play a role. As a reward for actually practicing what Internet slacktivists merely preach, you have just discovered that one of the selected speakers turned out to be the infamous criminal Goldst -- er, Moldbug.
What's the PR move that gets you through this without fundamentally betraying your principles by giving in to the baying mob?
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.
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.
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)
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.
You've been using HN as a dumping ground for ideological boilerplate for a long time. That's an abuse of this site. We asked you to stop but you didn't, so we've banned this account.
Inflammatory political arguments and talking points degrade this place, as the utter lameness of the current subthread makes clear. That isn't conversation; it's destructive of conversation. We want good conversation here.
Good conversation is unpredictable and involves people listening to and respecting one another. That's what matters, not blasting people with predetermined rhetoric.
> 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)
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.
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! :)
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.
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-...
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.