Agreed.
> People are voicing their disagreements with his professed viewpoints,
Voicing their disagreements with his pseudonymous comments from a completely different non-urbit context. I suspect (but I don't know) that if he wanted the public's perspective on his non-conformant political thought to skew the public's views on his technical design work, he wouldn't have used a pseudonym in the first place.
> yet you are using that cliche to dismiss them without addressing their viewpoints.
Quite the opposite. I am using that cliche, in a question, to ask if that is what the parent is asking (inciting?) us to do: arbite non-conformist thought.
The viewpoint that (here) I intentionally don't address can be summarized as: "I heard the designer wrote something that I disagree with elsewhere, under a pseudonym - more than once! I hereby dismiss anything he has to say on any matter." That's like saying: "Hitler lover strawberries, so we must all agree to avoid them."
> This does not lead to a vigorous discussion in the marketplace of ideas.
I agree, but... what marketplace of ideas? The aforementioned comments have nothing to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of urbit. A public shaming of a heretic is not a marketplace of ideas. Maybe the guy doesn't pay his taxes. Maybe he's behind on child support. Maybe he eats puppies for breakfast. I don't know. I also don't know that it really matters, as regards the merits (or lack thereof) of his engineering design.
And, I'm sorry. It seems that I have contributed to the thread going even further afield than it already had. I shouldn't have said anything to begin with...
For some, this means that they don't want to be professionally or socially associated with someone who thinks some ethnic groups make genetically good slaves. People can vigorously discuss whether his writings crossed lines of acceptable behavior.
However, you're also free to discuss the technical details as much as you want! If that's what's relevant to you, that's perfectly acceptable as well, and it doesn't require you to defend his other writings.
After I came across Urbit, I heard allegations of Yarvin's writings under his pseudonyms. I went and found his writings - and to the degree I understood it - I didn't agree with the conclusions. At the same time, I found a lot of the quoted material that had allowed me to find his writing in the first place was taken out of context.
But more importantly -- I didn't see even a hint of bad behavior in any of the developer's group discussion. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of taking what a person does "after hours" and putting it on display in the public square. If he were running some sort of "Boys From Brazil" project after hours, I'd probably feel differently, but that's not what he appears to be doing.
Why? What has he done to anyone? Do his designs have built-in genome detectors?
Or are you encouraging us all to join in as collective arbiters of wrong-think? Doesn't that seem a little too Maoist Cultural Revolution to you?