I think it's important to understand that inviting someone to speak does not mean you endorse what they say. If that were true, if a conference held a debate on opposing views, which view should the conference be endorsing? The conference serves as the messenger, not the message.

The traditional way to handle these issues is to have a complaint procedure. Either an email address, or even someone at the event who can handle such complaints. Keep in mind, attendees are under no obligation to go to every talk, so if you want to enjoy the event, you are welcome to simply not go to the talk you don't like.

In terms of the situation in question, by virtue of this action, StrangeLoop has now become a political conference, whether they wanted to or not. I am unclear on how their speaker selection process will change going forward. If I decide to submit a talk, do I need to worry that, after I arrange all my travel and such, that I will be dis-invited because of statements I have made in an unrelated venue?

I fully support the right of a conference to select who their speakers are, but when they use criteria unrelated to their stated mission, it does change the perception of the event.

Of course, if a person promises to speak on a technical topic, and then goes on a political rant, that's a reason to shut them down or walk out: the audience isn't getting what was expected and promised. But the mere fact of a person's unrelated political views being used to remove them from a speakers list - this is the sort of thing that you would expect from the USSR.

I think it's still worth briefly lamenting that our culture is heading in this direction. I see more and more echoes of the worldview and tactics that ultimately killed just shy of a hundred million people or so last century, and yes, it scares me.

Do you have any thoughts you'd be disinvited via public pressure from the best conferences for having? Will you in the culture of twenty or thirty years from now? Grist for the mill.

First of all, many more people complained than me. You didn't look very hard.

Second, I'm not _strictly_ a communist: I'm certainly very left-wing, and I often role-play a communist, because I think Americans need a connection to an actual left. My allegiance is ultimately to Deleuze, not Marx. To put it in terms of a meme image I saw the other day, around non-leftists, I usually use 'communist' as a shorthand, but amongst leftists, a more nuanced discussions can be had, for sure. EDIT: ahh, here we go: http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS

Finally, since you're dragging personal views into this, I'll just leave this here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...

My personal background is well known. I'm here logged in with my real name, I'm not hiding it. I don't know how Gawker's opinion of me is exactly relevant to whether or not you're a communist but that's fine.

If there's nothing wrong with being a communist why are you acting like I've slandered you by bring your background into this? It doesn't add up.

I'm a Zionist (see my top-level post and its link.) Does that make me unacceptably racist, in your view? I know Deleuze thought Zionism was a racist ideology.

Given that, in a conference as large as Strange Loop, there are undoubtedly people who do think Zionism is a proper subset of racism, would you support them in a call to have me excluded from that conference?

If not, what exactly about either my views or those people's intensity of repugnance for them is insufficient to get me kicked? If so, then as there are by far more racists of the Zionist stripe likely to attend, shouldn't you be looking into that? Why aren't you?

I'd also suggest you keep in mind that Urbit is, as technical ideas go, both marginally impactful (at least today), and extraordinarily idiosyncratic (see: the Nock ASCII pronunciation guide).

It is not remotely unreasonable for conference organizers barely acquainted with Urbit to be concerned that Yarvin's strident philosophical views might be entwined with his technical ideas, which one could fairly argue are --- unlike his politics --- obscurantist. If Urbit was more important, I'd understand more about the controversy. But this doesn't seem like a difficult call.

This is incredibly misleading. Replace "overtly nodding" with explicitly disavowing: the post in question is literally called "Why I am not a white nationalist" [1]. And that's not "people have accused me of being a white nationalist, here's why I'm not", it's "here's why I don't believe this thing I find wrong." Oh, and here's what he has to say about racist blogs:

(The Internet is also home to many out-and-out racist blogs. Most are simply unreadable. But some are hosted by relatively capable writers, such as "The Uhuru Guru" or "Big Effer." On these racist blogs you'll find racial epithets, anti-Semitism (see why I am not an anti-Semite) and the like. Obviously, I cannot recommend any of these blogs, and nor will I link to them. However, if you are interested in the mind of the modern racist, Google will get you there.)

Does that sound like the writing of a racist to you?

[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-a...

He sure does seem to have a finely-tuned appreciation of archaic racists, though.

I feel like --- maybe I've misinterpreted the whole piece, but this is what I think right now --- the misrepresentation here is yours. You lean on the title of the post, "Why I Am Not A White Nationalist", but if you've read it, I'll hazard a guess that in your heart you'd agree that it could be subtitled "But Not NOT One, Either".

Of course, I am not a white nationalist. I am not arguing that you should be a white nationalist. I am just suggesting that there are many bad reasons not to be a white nationalist.

[…]

So why am I not a white nationalist?

I am not a white nationalist because I don't find white nationalism useful or effective. I don't feel it helps me accurately perceive reality. In fact, I think it distorts reality. And I believe white nationalism is a very ineffective political device for solving the very real problems about which it complains.

This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program. You can be as smart as you want and think about white nationalism forever, and you will not come up with any productive strategy for collective action, white or otherwise.

At its best, white nationalism offers a sensible description of a general problem. [em mine] This problem certainly exists, and it falls under the larger category of bad government. (If allowing the old cities of North America to be overrun and rendered largely uninhabitable by murderous racist gangs isn't bad government, really, I'm not sure what is.)

He's not a white nationalist. He's something else.

There's also the historical context of this post, which is William Saletan's idiotic Slate posts about rational IQ variation.

I think a reader of this thread can understand why I'd say that it's you who were being misleading. I feel like that was probably unintentional on your part, because if you were trying to mount a careful bad-faith defense of Yarvin's writing, you probably wouldn't write things that would beg people to further quote it.

When I first read that Saletan post I found it pretty convincing. And when I did much more follow-up reading, reading lots of books and journal articles from all sides, it seemed like the preponderance of the evidence is on the side of there being significant ethnic based variation. For example - https://liberalbiorealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-likel... and his other posts, or https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-i...

You seem like a smart and open minded person. Why did you find Saletan's posts idiotic? I'm genuinely interested in your opinion. Don't answer in this thread though, email me at the address in my profile. You're writing under your real name, and in the possibility that I convince you, I don't want you to get purged.

If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.

Is there any possible evidence, any possible information, that could convince you that genes for IQ were not equally distributed among the races?

For my sake, there would be plenty of possible information that would convince me of the idea of neurological uniformity across ethnic groups, for example: studies of cross-racial adoption that showed the gap being erased, the existence of at least one black nation or city turning into Taiwan or Singapore, a closing of the gap in IQ tests, etc, etc.

If I can be convinced by evidence, but you cannot be convinced by evidence, then it is you who has a religious belief, and not me.

The "gap" between the races on matters such as income, education achievement, or the demographics of Google engineers is a source of constant handwringing.

There are two explanations that are publicly admissible:

1) You can slander and libel white people and blame racism 2) You can slander and libel black people and say it's because of "black culture", because black parents don't tell their kids to do well in school

If you take a third position, the position that thousands of years of evolving in different environments and civilization complexity levels meant that there is a different statistical distribution in different traits, which means there is a different

This third position blames no one, yet the holders of this position are called bigots and are banned from conferences if they even mention this view under a pseudonym in an unrelated context. I confronted tptacek, because he is a person that I have up until now respected, yet he called Saletan an idiot for holding this third position. So I was interested in why tptacek called Saletan an idiot, and I was also interested in the more general problem of how to convince reasonable people to stop slandering black people or slandering white people on the issue of the gap between the races.

I also didn't call Saletan an idiot, obviously.

"He apologized for the series of columns he wrote, and acknowledged that he sourced them poorly"

Are you referring to this article? http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur... I read this as him downplaying the certainty of the genetic hypothesis, in order to get the heat off his back. It is pretty obvious he is scared at getting purged: "I don't want this role...You'll have to judge the evidence for yourself." It is not obvious that he changed his mind. And he apologizes for not disclosing Rushton's associations, not for citing Ruston. He doesn't make any claims that Rushton's studies were bad science that should not be cited. Again, sounds like non-apology apology to get the heat off his back. But I can't peer into Saletan's soul so I don't know.

I don't actually think Saletan's article is a great article. I'm lukewarm on how accurate Rushton's stuff is; I think other evidence for the hypothesis that Saletan leaves out is actually more compelling. But I don't think the article is idiotic either.

He just stated that his belief is religious...

(Well, he didn't state that exactly, but he did state that you may as well treat it as such.)

So, two responses to your weird comment.

First: it's false that Chicago gangs are "racist". They aren't hunting down white people. They're hunting down rival gangs. They do that because they are, for the most part, teenagers locked in a vicious cycle of poverty and a total lack of opportunity.

Second: it's extremely sad if from these circumstances you've managed, like Yarvin seems to have, to draw a conclusion about the inferiority of African Americans.

I don't know you, but I feel like I've seen your name around HN for awhile now, and I hadn't had any reason to attach "racially prejudiced" to what little metadata I store about you. I'm hoping instead that I've just misread you. But "racist gangs" is a term you chose to use, which is disquieting.

There is sure as shit some racism tied up in gang violence, but it isn't the kind of racism Yarvin wants to talk about. He'd apparently rather talk at excruciating length about the racism of gang members.

I also think maybe you and I just shouldn't discuss this issue.

Many of the readers may in fact be white nationalists looking to Moldbug for justification for their ideals, and I'd speculate the post is written how it is because it's just not helpful to tell them their concerns are flat-out invalid.

I am not here to defend this position, I am simply here to say I find it to be something other than indefensible.

On the contrary, it's impossible to reach that conclusion if you read even cursorily. For example, neoreactionaries generally accept the results of mainstream academic studies concluding that Chinese are on average more intelligent than Europeans, and that European Jews are on average more intelligent than European Gentiles. These are not views traditionally associated with "white supremacy," to say the least.

P.S. +1 for the reference to one of my favorite sly Simpson's jokes.

It should be clear from my other comments that I am concerned with the principle of excluding people from apolitical fora on the grounds of racism alone. How justified or controversial it is to call someone a racist fails to engage the argument that it's a social evil to apply that test.

As to the technical value of Urbit itself, having passed a process explicitly designed to support neutral evaluation (blind review and ranking) it's unfair to start picking holes. (One thing I saw was a bit of point-and-laugh at the style of the C code used to implement it, which frankly is no worse or different than I've seen used in some more obscure languages like False, for example.)

Strange Loop has a blind review system?

Strange Loop has a two/three phase system, in which applications are blind-ranked, a panel takes the top ranked applications and further filters them based on 'softer' criteria (which may include demographic ones) and the final say is Alex Miller's. That at least is what I gathered from reading the blog about how talks are selected, and also from reading people on twitter discussing how Urbit got by them in the blind review stage.

In any case, it is way past my bed-time after this HN outage.

Incidentally, I'm irritated by Klabnik's politics. But I don't find them disqualifying. I am not so sure about Yarvin's. Can I reliably articulate why I think that's fair? No, I don't think so. And I can live with that.

That's comforting.

There are other contributors and they are tangibly harmed by this action, now and in the future. I think they will get over it. But I would guesstimate that overwhelmingly most of them are not interested in Moldbug or his politics, and they (we?) are also casualties of this shitstorm.

Please don't forget about it.

I think a lot of this is just people want their drama fix.

(There's a different pathology that makes me want to write about it. I'm aware, it doesn't need to be pointed out, but thanks in advance.)

That's what it means. Not just him, of course, but por ejemplo, and since you asked. If we ever do see Curtis invited to speak at any more conferences, I think we can also expect a repeat performance from the internet mobs.

Later: a cursory look at Klabnik's feed suggests it's likely to be true. Again: not a great thing for Klabnik to have done.

This boils down to personal politics - I only see one camp forcibly silencing another.

But his talk was about Urbit, not about his politics, and Urbit is a genuinely fascinating piece of technology. Even if the project fails, by studying it, I have learned a lot of ideas that I have applied to my own programming.

So there are two big issues with the ban. First, Alex made the conference worse for all those who cared about technology and not politics. Second, he's given the PC-police a scalp. This will make it much harder for anyone to write good-faith but politically incorrect critiques even under a pseudonym, for fear that it could harm career prospects in the future. And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them? Most solutions to our problems are outside the Overton window - if they weren't we would have solved the problems already.

Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience, rather than the technologists. That his prerogative.

But I hope that other conference organizers do not follow suit, and I hope that true technologists in turn shun StrangeLoop for conferences that care about technology first, and instead attend conferences that refuse to ban innovators who haven't violated the code of conduct.

This is precisely my point: other conferences already have followed suit, and they are not going to be shunned by the larger tech audience any time soon. A lot of important conferences would have done precisely the same thing. PyCon and xoxo to name two I know for certain.

In fact, to be honest, I'd go much further. If you polled the organizers of these conference, I think they would probably mostly say that if you are the sort of person who thinks that the moldbug affair is a great piece of injustice, you probably won't fit in at the conference they are trying to create. Fundamentally these measures are made to exclude people like you from the bunch, and shunning the conferences won't make that go away -- I actually think this is the goal.

    > This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend.

* He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the next thousand years.

* His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today.

It's hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I said to myself, "Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder if he'll be able to make it work."

> "And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them?"

Pick up a paper. Do you think our society lacks an ongoing discussion of the repercussions of racism? Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending – that people of some ethnic backgrounds are subhuman and fit only for slavery – were roundly rejected by society decades ago. Including him would be pandering to a common denominator so low it barely even registers today.

> "Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience"

As I suggested to another commenter: why don't you take a look at who was asking Yarvin's dismissal on Twitter and inquire with them as to whether they would describe themselves as "thin-skinned". Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event. It's easy to characterize the hypothetical "other" in your head. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?

What a crazy coincidence. This talk was accepted when nobody knew who Yarvin was, but now that you and your friends want to cast him out into the wilderness for disagreeing with your political opinions, all of a sudden you realize that the talk was technically uninteresting anyway. What are the odds, huh?

"Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending –"

Was he going to defend those views in his technical talk? If not, what's the problem?

"Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event."

Not going to happen, because that would be defined as "harassment" and get the asker fired. You guys have the industry locked up real tight.

This is a lie. Moldbug has never defended such a view, and only a willful misreading of his work could possibly lead to this conclusion.

For the curious, let's have a taste of what Moldbug has actually written on the subject [1]. Its only sin would appear to be the use of the slightly archaic (but nonpejorative [2]) term "Negro":

----

[T]he common meaning of racism implies the belief that ancestry is significant information in the context of common decisions about individuals.

It should be obvious that it is not. If you want to test a job applicant’s IQ, for example, give her an IQ test. Patterns of ancestry become useful only in decisions that affect large groups of humans in the aggregate. Governments, however, must often make such decisions.

Therefore, if you are an HNU [Human Neurological Uniformity] denialist and someone asks you whether you’re a racist, you can ask him if he implies the above belief, which we can call racial essentialism. (The Nazis, of course, were big essentialists.) If he says yes, tell him no. If he says no, you can tell him yes.

One also must be quite a bit more careful than Hume [quoted previously] with the words superior and inferior. This implies some quantitative ordering of overall personal worth, an idea one would expect Hume to be the last to accept. For example, consider the proposition that Jews tend to be better chess players than Negroes, whereas Negroes tend to be better dancers than Jews. Both halves of this statement may (or may not) be true, but neither can justify us in ranking the two races overall—unless our sole criterion of personal worth is either chess or dance. Which mine isn’t.

[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-...

[2]: http://www.uncf.org

I believe that I first found Moldbug via a post he wrote about the corruption and degeneracy in CS research: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w... I believe his critique to be accurate. There is nothing wrong with invective when it is true. Surely you are no stranger to invective against people who you think are in the wrong. Moldbug has always been someone who can both dish it and take it. Science and technology are moved forward via heated competition of people who are furiously working to prove that the other guy is full of crap, and that they have the true answer.

Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?

Thin-skinned is not a synonym for coward. Cowards say: "thank you sir, may I have another." People are thin-skinned because they think they can get their way if they make a fuss. Which they did. I have no interest in saying anything to their face, because they are strong, and I am weak.

As for the racism question...I have a proposal for you.

Can we make you dictator of an American city? Yes you, Alex Payne. We could shoot for Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or even my current city of Cleveland. If you are not the imperious type, we could just take the entire Jacobin board of directors, and make them the trustees of the city, and have you guys appoint a suitable executive.

As plenary rulers, you get full power to root out racism, correct inequalities, reduce homicide rates back to what they were in 1905, restore the rotting and decaying buildings, solve the wealth gap between the sexes, the races, and the classes, once and for all. You get to reorganize the police, fix the schools, and do whatever else you think is necessary. We'll give you lots of time. How much do you need? 20 years, 30 years, 50 years? That is fine.

I'm not actually joking about this. If you want this deal, we can talk about how to make it happen. It won't happen overnight, but I think a lot on the right would actually be amenable to this. You win, we lose. We take the knee, you rule. Seriously. You're going to win any way. As you say, Curtis's views were already soundly rejected. If you're going to win, I would rather have it all above board, so that if your plans fail to restore our cities, then at least you can't blame the wreckers, you can't say that you're ideas weren't truly implemented, etc. And hey, maybe you'll succeed and that'll be awesome. Either way, it is better for everyone if we just formalize the relationship and acknowledge that you are in charge.

So what do you say?

More specifically, his criticism of Haskell seems to be misplaced by his criteria of developing useful software, if you accept that the seL4 microkernel is useful, which I gather it is, otherwise General Dynamics et. al. are wasting money. I can't tell, it's perhaps a bit early to get a list of hardware using it, but previous L4 versions have been used in billions of Qualcomm chips and apparently all iOS devices.

And the related academic Barrelfish OS researchers seem to me to be doing something useful, and the languages they are using are C, with various bits of that generated by Haskell (e.g. hardware descriptions -> C).

It's a pity that Urbit now has no chance of greater success, the SJWs of computing going so far as to say it "has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675512), which is obviously worse than the "monarchy" of superuser vs. user.

"When I worry about Urbit and privacy, I worry that it will create too much privacy, rather than too little. Certainly several services not too dissimilar to Urbit, such as Freenet, have become hives of digital vice - at best.

Only social and political methods, not technical tools, can fight this filth. One of the inspirations for Urbit’s political design is James C. Scott’s classic political-science text, Seeing Like a State. Urbit is not in any sense a state, but its fabric has the regularity that, according to Scott, is essential for the construction of anything like a civilized society. But of course, a basically virtuous society, in which antisocial behavior is not tolerated and easily excluded or destroyed, can only be built from virtuous users." http://web.archive.org/web/20131014210123/http://www.urbit.o...

It goes on in that vein. After re-reading that, I guess it's debatable whether Urbit's politics are neoreactionary or merely pretty socially conservative, but they're somewhere in that spectrum.

Previous related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579542

> Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

> However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

> I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.

— Richard Stallman

My understanding of Urbit comes mostly from this writeup on Popehat [1] and an initial foray into the documentation of Nock and Hoon. However, the impression that I get of it enabling encrypted, distributed programs, does mirror Yarvin's proposed "Patchwork" system of nation-states [2], in the same way that a single root user mirrors a monarchy, and with analogous pros and cons between the technical and political systems.

[0]: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-n...

[1]: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-...

[2]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwo...