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.