TL;DR - racism sprinkled with claims of not being a racist by the author's definition of racism. An article written because the author does not want his political advocacy to affect his carrier, so he thought that more toxic opinions would serve towards that purpose.
The sad thing is that LambdaConf, a super awesome conference organized by super awesome folks, is now destroyed, losing all good will because of this one single act. Which is what happens when you've got tolerant people being taken advantage of and going to the extreme of tolerating intolerance.
How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on, and most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes.
It's also not clear to me what is the "intolerance" that they are tolerating. Can you provide textual evidence for Moldbug being intolerant? In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
> most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes
People attending? Maybe they'll forget. But many of the regular speakers or sponsors from FP conferences will not.
On the Scala side I know of at least the Typelevel Summit in Boulder being canceled (http://goo.gl/2HAVca) and along with sponsors like 47 degrees pulling their sponsorship for LambdaConf (http://goo.gl/h9WucI). Note that the Typelevel members are community leaders that have contributed to many projects, including Scalaz, Cats, Algebra, Shapeless, Simulacrum, Machinist, Ensime, Spire, etc. And on the Clojure side you've got people like David Nolen of ClojureScript and Om fame saying that LambdaConf is now on the list of conferences he'll never attend.
People follow leaders and if you think this won't have repercussions for LambdaConf, think again.
> In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
Related to this article, I'm not interested in arguing the fine nuances of his argument or the English language, but when you don't consider other people as being your equal, that's racist by definition. A fact made clear by Moldbug's writing. And the fact that there are people that jump in defense of his narrative highlights the importance of speaking and acting against such beliefs.
The point is not about him being a racist or not.
As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.
I also don't mind if people don't attend his talks as a form of protest. Heck I probably wouldn't go to them myself.
But demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference because you don't agree with them on something that has nothing to do with the topics of said conference seems to set a bad precedence.
After all that might give others the right to demand people not be permitted to speak because they are communists, gay, hippies, or what else.
As for tolerant people being tricked into allowing intolerance.
I'm pretty sure everybody there has a limit on intolerance that they won't tolerate anymore. I firmly believe that everybody has the absolute right for physical protection, so if he had a history of violence there would have been a clear cut line.
However, I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm". I expect adults to be able to control themselves enough that this shouldn't be an issue.
If all he's done is being an ass, that doesn't justify him being kicked out.
> The point is not about him being a racist or not. As long as he doesn't bring his personal views to a professional setting I don't care about them.
You're free to have that belief, but like it or not, being included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas and others might not like it.
> demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference ... because they are communists, gay, hippies ...
Right here is the mistake that I think the organizers of LambdaConf did.
You cannot compare gays and hippies with white supremacists, because being gay or hippie does not rob others of their humanity. Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Now, I've heard somebody making a valid point: another speaker happens to work on military drones, that ultimately have been used to target women and children. Why aren't people outraged about that one?
Well, maybe we should be outraged about that one as well, though the context is different, as military drones, like science in general, can be used for both good and evil. For example the same science that gave us a process for producing nitrogen and synthetic fertilizer is also responsible for gas warfare in WWI. So context matters, I'm not ready yet to condemn the work on military drones as being evil (though it probably is), but I sure am ready to condemn racism, because personally I believe that racism represents the worst of humanity, being the justification given to most wars that ever happened.
> I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm"
First of all we aren't talking about what is legal. If we are, then having a belief that somebody shouldn't speak at a conference is perfectly within our right for freedom of expression. And this isn't censorship, but Ostracism, an act which again, is perfectly within our right for freedom of association. People are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
That said, in my country at least, the freedom of speech does not hold for hate speech and you can be prosecuted for causing emotional harm due to hate speech targeting groups based on religion, ethnicity, race or sex. Note that whether the author would escape guilt, that's for a court to decide and I'm not a lawyer, but to me his writings sure sound like hate speech.
And don't get me wrong, if he would be found innocent of hate speech by a court, then I expect for people to uphold his right for freedom of speech, but again, that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
> included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas
The question is does it give credence to the ideas presented at the conference or does it give credence to all of his ideas?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I find that we place people that give talks at conferences, on a way to high pedestal. It feels like presenting oneself has become more important than writing code.
> Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Neither does racism "in the theoretical sense" as the author of the article argues. And I'm not buying his argument either, so you simply can't ignore the the fact that communism produced the biggest genocides.
>Why aren't people outraged about that one?
To be honest I actually would be all in to ban a person developing military drones that can be used for "offensive" attacks from the conference.
A person directly developing tools for murder has crossed the line of non-violence I talked about earlier.
> racism ... being the justification ... to most wars ...
So would you ban all religious people because religion has been used as a justification for war over and over again?
To me there is a difference between believing something bad and having the intention to act on it.
I don't care about the author as long as he doesn't go out the next day to spit on a black person. And from what I've read the author has this weird "different but equally worth" racism that is somewhat "benign" (as in tumor).
The person developing the drones however is directly ruining peoples lives. Of course he doesn't pull the trigger, but he willingly gives a gun to a psychopath.
> First of all we aren't talking about what is legal.
Why would we? If he had planned on doing something illegal at a conference and then got banned for it there would be zero discussion.
> in my country at least
UK? And I'm pretty sure that you won't be persecuted for causing "emotional harm" but for "disturbing the peace" or "inciting violence" or something similar.
Note that in this case people claim that the emotional harm isn't caused by him giving a racist talk (which would be hate speech and which he's not going to give), but _his mere presence_.
And I think as an adult one should be able to tolerate the presence of another person no matter how much one hates their views.
> people are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
>that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
Of course people are free to not attend. But then they should accept the vote people cast and stop the brigading.
I am very sure that the people most vocal about this right now would try to stop and ruin any "racist" conference by putting pressure on sponsors and speakers.
I really hope that the mob is proud of its actions when the conference is canceled. "Hey, everybody is worse off now, but at least me made our point!"
If the conference isn't canceled, I really hope the organizers make a list of people and companies who tried to kill the conference and never sell them a ticket to a future conference again. (No bad blood, just helping them remember their big words.)
> How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on
I don't think that's a given; all but one of their corporate sponsors have pulled out, so it might not be feasible. I don't know how many of their sponsors were providing money vs. sponsoring events, though.
I don't disagree with the assertion, but i also cannot agree, primarily because i am actually confused. I don't see anything he wrote in the post that's racist. Maybe i missed it. Can you please point out which parts of his post are actually racist?
> the author's definition of racism
Are you talking about "someone who thinks white people are better than black people"? Because if so, you misunderstood him, though understandably so. That quote is not an actual definition of racism. It is a simplified start of an explanation in which he looks at a detailed example. His actual definition is not mentioned. Note the leading phrase there: "Let’s agree"
And if I may quote: "Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences."
"A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn".
Since you're so concerned about tolerant people being taken advantage of, may we also assume that you'd oppose LambdaConf having a speaker who was a revolutionary Communist? You don't get a much more destructive and intolerant ideology than that one, after all, and there are a lot of people from formerly-Communist countries who would have every right under this philosophy to feel unsafe.
I think Curtis Yarvin's biggest flaw is that he gets carried away. (He shares that flaw with some other guru personalities, like Eliezer Yudkowsky.) He'll write a big post to make programmers less nervous about his presence at LambdaConf, and he'll stick "BTW nerds ruined Detroit" right in the middle of that post, just because he can't resist a tangent. Inviting him to speak was a noble choice, but I feel sympathy for the conference organizers who are probably praying that he doesn't do the same on stage. It's good that he's promising to speak only about programming. I wish this post had followed the same guideline.
Folk seem to be easily declaring this person an obvious racist, but all the quotes I've seen to support this so far are either:
- The author writing they support willing slavery (which doesn't really seem to be slavery).
- A quote (that circulated Twitter as evidence of racism) saying that suitability to slavery was 'parsimoniously' linked to race. Which seems to rely on the audience not knowing what 'parsimonious' means.
The author's an idiot and an edgelord (and also a shitty writer, hence the pain of finding quotes in his crap), but from what I've seen so far he's not worse than other people who've spouted 'kill all X' and been supported by other conference organisers.
Slavery is about humans being classified as property, with property law applied to slaves, which means that slavery cannot be willing by definition. And past examples of slavery that he uses in support of his claims haven't been willing at all, while at the same time he tries to muddy the waters by classifying student debt as being slavery.
Now you can argue that in the US student debt is slavery, given that declaring bankruptcy on student debt is very hard (due to BAPCPA). This I think is a failure of the US education system, making me glad that I was raised in an European country where the education system is largely subsidized by the state and where public schools are still the best ones. Even so, I'm not interested in arguing that student debt in the US is a form of debt bondage, which is classified as "modern day slavery" by the United Nations and being prohibited by internal law.
The far bigger issue is this logical fallacy that's being used to justify this author's thoughts on the matter: "if X is at least as worse as Y in my worldview and Y is tolerated, then X should be tolerated as well".
And that's just wrong. For one because it often is an unfair comparisson (student debt vs Afro-Americans born into slavery and completely owned by their masters). But also because tolerance for Y does NOT exempt X from being judged. Couldn't find a name for this logical fallacy, but it should have one ;-)
It's a very simple question, what specially don't you understand?
You seem to think the author made some kind of assertion that people as property is OK, when the author has written the opposite. Is there evidence to support that?
No, I haven't made that claim and no, the author has not written the exact opposite, unless we speak a different English (always a possibility given it's not my native tongue).
Quite satisfying to see somebody decry the elite's IQism (something both the right and the left are guilty of), insult Trump and his voters, and call the mob out for the chimpanzee-like pleasure they partake in.
____
I don't think he can change anybody's mind by telling them he cannot be racist because he doesn't believe intellect makes somebody a better person. (1.) How do we know he's really telling the truth and it's not just sophistry? (2.) Beliefs that are tied to self-esteem are difficult to undo, and a belief in human neurological uniformity (HNU) is often helpful when you do not want to be thought of as racist, yet wish to allow yourself feelings of intellectual superiority.
____
I've found it very interesting to watch people come out and say what they really think. For example, the CTO of NPM recently tweeted "This is like when we made Eich quit Mozilla. There are views we have decided are unacceptable and we will ostracize you for having them." [0]
After all of the activism for 'safety' and 'codes of conduct', I did not expect to see people finally admit that it's really about about the right to be employed or have an audience if you are to hold or have held 'bad' beliefs.
Still, it may well be the case that everybody that has been de-platformed or fired over the past decade has deserved it, or that certain people must be purged in order for us to maintain a public square that is acceptable for minorities. Even if it is for the greater good, I still hope that those with political power will come to reflect on their actions and evaluate the harms that they might have inadvertently caused others. Ultimately very few people believe themselves to be evil and deserving of punishment. And if one day a mistake is made and the wrong person is thrown under the bus, a lack of remorse or responsibility will not be seen as endearing.
The thing is that Yarvin's been a huge edgelord with his neoreactionary blogging. And then it turned out people took him as seriously as he hoped to be taken ... and this is now hanging over his startup business like a radioactive anvil.
The ultimate issue is: “don’t be a provocateur and then whine when you find out that the people you deliberately pissed off are pissed off at you.” http://philsandifer.tumblr.com/post/141737493541/responses-y... (and note, that's a somewhat sympathetic post)
32 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadThe sad thing is that LambdaConf, a super awesome conference organized by super awesome folks, is now destroyed, losing all good will because of this one single act. Which is what happens when you've got tolerant people being taken advantage of and going to the extreme of tolerating intolerance.
It's also not clear to me what is the "intolerance" that they are tolerating. Can you provide textual evidence for Moldbug being intolerant? In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
People attending? Maybe they'll forget. But many of the regular speakers or sponsors from FP conferences will not.
On the Scala side I know of at least the Typelevel Summit in Boulder being canceled (http://goo.gl/2HAVca) and along with sponsors like 47 degrees pulling their sponsorship for LambdaConf (http://goo.gl/h9WucI). Note that the Typelevel members are community leaders that have contributed to many projects, including Scalaz, Cats, Algebra, Shapeless, Simulacrum, Machinist, Ensime, Spire, etc. And on the Clojure side you've got people like David Nolen of ClojureScript and Om fame saying that LambdaConf is now on the list of conferences he'll never attend.
People follow leaders and if you think this won't have repercussions for LambdaConf, think again.
> In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.
Related to this article, I'm not interested in arguing the fine nuances of his argument or the English language, but when you don't consider other people as being your equal, that's racist by definition. A fact made clear by Moldbug's writing. And the fact that there are people that jump in defense of his narrative highlights the importance of speaking and acting against such beliefs.
I also don't mind if people don't attend his talks as a form of protest. Heck I probably wouldn't go to them myself.
But demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference because you don't agree with them on something that has nothing to do with the topics of said conference seems to set a bad precedence.
After all that might give others the right to demand people not be permitted to speak because they are communists, gay, hippies, or what else.
As for tolerant people being tricked into allowing intolerance. I'm pretty sure everybody there has a limit on intolerance that they won't tolerate anymore. I firmly believe that everybody has the absolute right for physical protection, so if he had a history of violence there would have been a clear cut line.
However, I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm". I expect adults to be able to control themselves enough that this shouldn't be an issue. If all he's done is being an ass, that doesn't justify him being kicked out.
Sticks and stones.
You're free to have that belief, but like it or not, being included as a speaker at an important conference gives a person prestige and credence for his ideas and others might not like it.
> demanding somebody be cancelled from a conference ... because they are communists, gay, hippies ...
Right here is the mistake that I think the organizers of LambdaConf did.
You cannot compare gays and hippies with white supremacists, because being gay or hippie does not rob others of their humanity. Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Now, I've heard somebody making a valid point: another speaker happens to work on military drones, that ultimately have been used to target women and children. Why aren't people outraged about that one?
Well, maybe we should be outraged about that one as well, though the context is different, as military drones, like science in general, can be used for both good and evil. For example the same science that gave us a process for producing nitrogen and synthetic fertilizer is also responsible for gas warfare in WWI. So context matters, I'm not ready yet to condemn the work on military drones as being evil (though it probably is), but I sure am ready to condemn racism, because personally I believe that racism represents the worst of humanity, being the justification given to most wars that ever happened.
> I don't think that anybody has the right to not be offended, or to be protected from "emotional harm"
First of all we aren't talking about what is legal. If we are, then having a belief that somebody shouldn't speak at a conference is perfectly within our right for freedom of expression. And this isn't censorship, but Ostracism, an act which again, is perfectly within our right for freedom of association. People are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
That said, in my country at least, the freedom of speech does not hold for hate speech and you can be prosecuted for causing emotional harm due to hate speech targeting groups based on religion, ethnicity, race or sex. Note that whether the author would escape guilt, that's for a court to decide and I'm not a lawyer, but to me his writings sure sound like hate speech.
And don't get me wrong, if he would be found innocent of hate speech by a court, then I expect for people to uphold his right for freedom of speech, but again, that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
The question is does it give credence to the ideas presented at the conference or does it give credence to all of his ideas?
On a somewhat unrelated note, I find that we place people that give talks at conferences, on a way to high pedestal. It feels like presenting oneself has become more important than writing code.
> Communism, in the theoretical sense, wouldn't be guilty of that either.
Neither does racism "in the theoretical sense" as the author of the article argues. And I'm not buying his argument either, so you simply can't ignore the the fact that communism produced the biggest genocides.
>Why aren't people outraged about that one?
To be honest I actually would be all in to ban a person developing military drones that can be used for "offensive" attacks from the conference.
A person directly developing tools for murder has crossed the line of non-violence I talked about earlier.
> racism ... being the justification ... to most wars ...
So would you ban all religious people because religion has been used as a justification for war over and over again?
To me there is a difference between believing something bad and having the intention to act on it. I don't care about the author as long as he doesn't go out the next day to spit on a black person. And from what I've read the author has this weird "different but equally worth" racism that is somewhat "benign" (as in tumor).
The person developing the drones however is directly ruining peoples lives. Of course he doesn't pull the trigger, but he willingly gives a gun to a psychopath.
> First of all we aren't talking about what is legal.
Why would we? If he had planned on doing something illegal at a conference and then got banned for it there would be zero discussion.
> in my country at least
UK? And I'm pretty sure that you won't be persecuted for causing "emotional harm" but for "disturbing the peace" or "inciting violence" or something similar.
Note that in this case people claim that the emotional harm isn't caused by him giving a racist talk (which would be hate speech and which he's not going to give), but _his mere presence_.
And I think as an adult one should be able to tolerate the presence of another person no matter how much one hates their views.
> people are always free to organize events that accept this person (with LambdaConf choosing this path) and the author can even start his own conferences and communities.
>that doesn't mean people can't exercise their own freedom of speech or freedom of association.
Of course people are free to not attend. But then they should accept the vote people cast and stop the brigading.
I am very sure that the people most vocal about this right now would try to stop and ruin any "racist" conference by putting pressure on sponsors and speakers.
If the conference isn't canceled, I really hope the organizers make a list of people and companies who tried to kill the conference and never sell them a ticket to a future conference again. (No bad blood, just helping them remember their big words.)
I don't think that's a given; all but one of their corporate sponsors have pulled out, so it might not be feasible. I don't know how many of their sponsors were providing money vs. sponsoring events, though.
I'm not sure who you think the organizers of LambdaConf were taken advantage of by—Yarvin? He's not the one trying to scuttle LambdaConf, though.
I don't disagree with the assertion, but i also cannot agree, primarily because i am actually confused. I don't see anything he wrote in the post that's racist. Maybe i missed it. Can you please point out which parts of his post are actually racist?
> the author's definition of racism
Are you talking about "someone who thinks white people are better than black people"? Because if so, you misunderstood him, though understandably so. That quote is not an actual definition of racism. It is a simplified start of an explanation in which he looks at a detailed example. His actual definition is not mentioned. Note the leading phrase there: "Let’s agree"
It's been said that to prove and to refute hate speech, like most other bullshit, takes orders of magnitude more effort than to produce it.
However, this article makes perfectly clear to me the author's opinions on the matter, which are clearly racist: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ro/2009/07/why-carl...
And if I may quote: "Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences."
"A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn".
But the reason for his presence causing LambdaConf problems has nothing to do with FP.
Oh boy.
- The author writing they support willing slavery (which doesn't really seem to be slavery).
- A quote (that circulated Twitter as evidence of racism) saying that suitability to slavery was 'parsimoniously' linked to race. Which seems to rely on the audience not knowing what 'parsimonious' means.
The author's an idiot and an edgelord (and also a shitty writer, hence the pain of finding quotes in his crap), but from what I've seen so far he's not worse than other people who've spouted 'kill all X' and been supported by other conference organisers.
Now you can argue that in the US student debt is slavery, given that declaring bankruptcy on student debt is very hard (due to BAPCPA). This I think is a failure of the US education system, making me glad that I was raised in an European country where the education system is largely subsidized by the state and where public schools are still the best ones. Even so, I'm not interested in arguing that student debt in the US is a form of debt bondage, which is classified as "modern day slavery" by the United Nations and being prohibited by internal law.
The far bigger issue is this logical fallacy that's being used to justify this author's thoughts on the matter: "if X is at least as worse as Y in my worldview and Y is tolerated, then X should be tolerated as well".
And that's just wrong. For one because it often is an unfair comparisson (student debt vs Afro-Americans born into slavery and completely owned by their masters). But also because tolerance for Y does NOT exempt X from being judged. Couldn't find a name for this logical fallacy, but it should have one ;-)
Has the author argued that people should be classed as property anywhere in their writings?
You seem to think the author made some kind of assertion that people as property is OK, when the author has written the opposite. Is there evidence to support that?
The author wrote specifically they believe slavery is a bad thing in their AMA here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...
After all of the activism for 'safety' and 'codes of conduct', I did not expect to see people finally admit that it's really about about the right to be employed or have an audience if you are to hold or have held 'bad' beliefs.
Still, it may well be the case that everybody that has been de-platformed or fired over the past decade has deserved it, or that certain people must be purged in order for us to maintain a public square that is acceptable for minorities. Even if it is for the greater good, I still hope that those with political power will come to reflect on their actions and evaluate the harms that they might have inadvertently caused others. Ultimately very few people believe themselves to be evil and deserving of punishment. And if one day a mistake is made and the wrong person is thrown under the bus, a lack of remorse or responsibility will not be seen as endearing.
[0] https://twitter.com/seldo/status/714272018976284672
The ultimate issue is: “don’t be a provocateur and then whine when you find out that the people you deliberately pissed off are pissed off at you.” http://philsandifer.tumblr.com/post/141737493541/responses-y... (and note, that's a somewhat sympathetic post)