If you look at Bitcoin and the blockchain as a purely technical achievement, it's marvelous and incredible, a testament to human ingenuity. The problem is that money is not a purely technical problem, and people involved in Bitcoin who ignore that open themselves to a whole lot of relearning, like when people who are given the ability to steal a whole lot of money end up stealing a whole lot of money, like at ShapeShift[1]. Banks have been dealing with these kinds of problems for decades (or, depending on how you look at it, hundreds if not thousands of years). But if you only concern yourself with the technical aspects of Bitcoin, not the social or political aspects, you can miss things that seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
And the software that people creates has implications that range far beyond technical questions. A great example of how we can encode assumptions that come from our beliefs, our experiences, who we are and where we happened to be born into software without even realizing that we've done so is the fantastic essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[2]." Reading that should be a real eye-opener about how, without intending to, programmers can end up writing software that is built for people Like Them and is unaccomodating to people who Aren't Like Them.
Most of the talk about his personal views here are about his views on race. It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone that the sort of people who are at Hacker News are likely more white than the rest of America, much less the world. As are a lot of the people writing software in use today. Sometimes that means that Google Photos categorizes someone's pictures of himself and his girlfriend as "gorillas"[3], which is the sort of error one imagines Google would be a lot less likely to make if they had more African-Americans working on their code and testing their software before release. Or machine learning algorithms that courts use to predict recidivism rates in determining sentencing have much higher false positive rates for African-Americans than whites.[4]
And making this place more welcoming to Curtis Yarvin by focusing discussion on the technical merits of Urbit and ignoring his personal views is a signal to a lot of other people about what we as a community value and what we don't. And I think it's a bad signal, because it alienates people with valuable and important viewpoints that we ought to be finding ways to be more open to, not less.
1) https://news.bitcoin.com/looting-fox-sabotage-shapeshift/
2) https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
3) http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-p...
4) https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
White like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, you mean?
Google is 60% white. Facebook is 55%. Microsoft is 59%. USA is 63%. Do you have any evidence that HN is whiter than Google and Facebook? Why not say what you really mean, namely that there are too many Asians?
Or machine learning algorithms that courts use to predict recidivism rates in determining sentencing have much higher false positive rates for African-Americans than whites.[4]
Not according to the R script written by the very authors of the piece you cite. That script is unable to find statistically significant evidence of bias. They found very strong evidence (p < 0.001) that the statistical model is highly effective, albeit imperfectly calibrated [1].
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....
It's silly to say that by focusing on a technology project and ignoring the people involved, we alienate people. Where I work we have similar views - "meritocracy" is one of our core values, not the dirty word it's become in the valley. As the only member of my race at this company this makes me feel welcome - I'm as valuable as the things I build, who cares about my race?
[1] This means that higher score means higher recidivism rate, but a 60% score doesn't necessarily mean 60% recidivism probability. Probably should have run isotonic regression or something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotonic_regression
I don't know if you're doing this (again and again) intentionally or not, but racial bias is not statistical bias[1]!
> It's silly to say that by focusing on a technology project and ignoring the people involved, we alienate people.
How do you know it's silly? Have you done any research on that? Because people who have actually done some research have come to the conclusion that it is your assumption that is silly[2].
> "meritocracy" is one of our core values
Meritocracy is not a value (or not a distinguishing value). It's what every (long surviving) system believes itself to be. The term is ironic and generally means "a system that deludes itself about its own fairness". The term was coined as a satirical joke, and has no other well-defined meaning.
[1]: Unless your statistics includes every possibly pertinent variable, or you manage to prove total independence of your model's variables from all other variables.
So if someone working on an open source project were to blog, completely separately from the open source project, their personal views on, say, abortion you'd be OK with it if whenever we tried to have a discussion about that project people started discussing that contributor's views on abortion?
If not, what is the criteria for deciding what kind of unrelated personal views are OK to bring up in technical discussions?
1) http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
For instance, instead of talking about Urbit, we're instead mired in the finer points of one guy's murky theories on sociology.
This is not an interesting discussion on Hacker News! Racists are not exactly a rare breed, nor do the outspoken ones ever (intentional Sith absolute) bring anything interesting to the discussion.
You can't have one without the other.
If people want to a clean state restart of the world of computing without an infestation of corporations they'll be against attempts to shun him.
But I was referring to the fact that nobody else is solving this specific problem. You either stay happy with your collection of walled gardens or you wait to see if he can unbreak the internet.
In fact in this case, the work goes ahead anyway. Perhaps you end up using it in ten years, or perhaps you don't. But neither of us gain anything from this argument at the present time.
> If you're interested in that approach, I'd encourage you to check out sandstorm.io. This solves the problem for applications like a blog, email, or gitlab. What it doesn't do is make decentralized applications easier to build.
If you'd prefer this not to be the case, please outline what restrictions on free speech you'd like emplaced so that people would not be able to discuss his views.
He's incapable of leading a project because you're unwilling to control yourself?
Why continuously bring it up? We've already had this discussion numerous times.
Is there like an intermediate-level overview of Curtis's offensive beliefs, with a glossary and index? I'd be surprised if nobody's assembled one; it could make the ad hominems so much more effective.
(NB - the article refers to Yarvin as "Mencius Moldbug", his nom de plume for political ranting)
[1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
Wow, really? I'd consider that worse than removing comments.
I don't see why that would make people from those groups feel unwelcome. If anything I would expect people from the groups that he says were genetically not as good as slaves to be the ones who would feel unwelcome. The implication is that they are weaker or less resilient.
Was it something like "yeah it is a functional system... hey have I mentioned how much potential you have for whenever you feel like dedicating your life to slavery?"
...or was it just the guy rambling on a blog of his under a pen name?
It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive, but if the guy is strictly professional when it comes to Urbit, treats everyone with the same respect and works just fine along with many people that despise his views, how are the project's goals tainted?
Is it? From what I've seen so far all the controversy has come from taking statements out of context.
However, I take your main point that it doesn't need to impact on Urbit.
As much as some people like to pretend it's only about tech, tech is made by people and it requires them to interact with each other, and that can never be completely confined to code.
While talking to Urbit contributors about Urbit?
And in fact, every Urbit contributor in this thread who's mentioned this has also heard about Yarvin's political views, and not from this thread. It appears to me there's already a kind of self-selection process in Urbit contributors, towards those who are comfortable tolerating his garbage. And that's exactly the problem.
There is certainly some self-selection for people who don't throw tech babies out with political bathwater. I count myself as one such person. I mean, I continued using Javascript and Firefox even after hearing about Brendan Eich's political contribution! Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of gay marriage.
I have also toyed around with Urbit, and have (in a sense) made minor contributions. Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of Yarvin's political writing.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/djspiewak/3a6ff436865d9e5794e4
I mean, I guess you're technically correct: If nothing else, the impact of his views on the project is that it results in the exclusion of people who choose to exclude themselves from projects created by "the wrong people".
But of course that's trivially true of all projects, so why do you think it's such a problem in this particular case? If you answer "because his views are really bad" while acknowledging that they otherwise have no direct bearing on the technology, you're basically saying "because he's really unpopular".
I have no love of Yarvin's politics, but that sort of cure is worse than the disease.
I don't acknowledge that his views have no direct bearing on the technology, either, and that's tied up in my first point. We design things for ourselves, for the most part, so by excluding (perhaps inadvertently) people with different perspectives on life, we lose out on valuable input.
I think we agree that Urbit would benefit from a larger, more diverse user/contributor base. What wouldn't? We're just ascribing agency in different places. I view the claim that Yarvin is excluding people as a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. What he's actually done is 1) publish some really unpopular opinions, and 2) build Urbit. It is entirely possible to evaluate 2 on its own merits[1]. So I'm disappointed to see so many people write it off for other IMO less relevant reasons.
It reminds me a bit of a "Christian-friendly" Linux distro I once saw that omitted software written by known homosexuals. Would you also claim that the gay programmers were (perhaps inadvertently) excluding a subset of Christians? I suspect most people would agree in this case that agents of exclusion are the ones actually performing the exclusive act, rather than ones who happened to be "the wrong people" from another group's point of view.
[1]: This is true even in the presence of a strong political influence on the technology. I honestly don't see much of a connection between Urbit and Moldbug's politics, but then the latter never made much sense to me, so maybe I'm missing something. If there are politically objectionable aspects to the software, then by all means object! But plain old guilt by association is a weak argument in any context, doubly so in a technical one.
Is this supposed to be in his favor?
EDIT: For clarity
You're putting words in 5F36B5F62640's mouth.
And to be absolutely honest, anybody reading this can see that you're the one attempting to make people feel unwelcome in this community.
Edit: The commenter has now upgraded his comment but the original with added emphasis is quoted above.
Rather than attacking me personally, is there something I missed or was incorrect about?
I'm not attacking you personally, nor am I speaking to you personally. I am just pointing out to anybody reading this, that you just tried to smear somebody.
Of course, whether you did so on purpose is another matter.
To restate, then: "Wait, so your argument is that only Native Americans would feel unwelcome in this community?
Is this supposed to be in his favor?"
I appreciate your dedication to accuracy, and I must assume this satisfies your complaint.
Yes, that is no longer accusatory; and it is correct: there are other sets of people that would no doubt feel unwelcome in such a community.
I think in a practical sense their fear is overblown as 'Code is law'. However people generally make decisions based on consensus reality.
I'm curious, do you take that to speak well or ill about the ethnic groups in question?