“A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop” • Hacker News Board

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#91

Post by braythwayt » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

PopeOfNope wrote: post #88

braythwayt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that we can use words like “succumb.” It’s always that way when you have a strong opinion about a particular matter. For example, we can praise Obama for listening to scientists on certain matters, than complain he is caving under lobbying pressure on others. In the end, I prefer to say that it is Alex’s decision. He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. He decided, and that means yo…

> He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision. Once…

TL;DR: “Our way of life is under attack by all those mobs of non-straight, non-white, non-males.”

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#92

Post by tomjen3 » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

ncallaway wrote: post #52

paxdickinson wrote: post #20

The repeated kills of previous threads on this topic illustrate the problem goes much deeper than Strangeloop. HN itself has long been policed by left wing stormtroopers eliminating anything they disagree with. I used to believe it could be saved but now I generally believe that the era of technology having a place for iconoclastic freethinkers is long over.

The great thing about technology is you can always make your own space. You can have a niche website — or other technological forum — that is a bastion of iconoclastic freethinkers. The problem that you're experiencing is that the mainstream public is now very much using technology. That means the average opinions expressed on the web on the internet have become much more mainstream. Which, pretty much by definition,…

And if you make your own space online, then what happens when you lose your job because you were a member/founder of offensive side X?

Heck, look at how much bullshit the Reddit founders have had to wade though?

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#93

Post by dang » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 9:54 PM UTC

pep888 wrote: post #31

topynate wrote: post #11

Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and when something is 'too racist'. The same goes for the other beyond-the-pale isms like sexism, fascism, etc. I commented on a flagged post on why this is an issue for me personally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674958

No, it is not. That is flatly untrue nonsense. It is always SL's decision, that they are making with feedback It saddens me that you're making this obviously fallacious argument, because your reasoning is so transparent. You're a Zionist, who has sworn allegience to a genocidal government. As a supporter of genocide, you are concerned that someday you'll face consequences for your decision to materially support mass…

This is not an acceptable Hacker News comment, regardless of the positions it's for and against. Please comment civilly and substantively, or not at all.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#94

Post by dang » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #12

Mithaldu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that the concensus is that the author of that submission is insane and trying to read his screed as something coming from a mentally healthy person is a waste of time.

Yeah I posted this because I felt HN people are smart enough to question and discuss this decision without being told to do so by some goofy conservative blog. (N.B.: I didn't and would never flag that other submission, because goofy conservatives don't bother me and the actual topic was interesting, but I understand that tastes differ so I'm not surprised that others flagged it.)

The earlier post was flagkilled by users. We unkilled it because there was an ongoing discussion, but did not turn off the flags. That's what we do in nearly all such cases.

The current post was penalized by the flamewar detector, but we've canceled the penalty because the community clearly wants to talk about this, and what you posted is as close to a canonical source as we're likely to get.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#95

Post by PopeOfNope » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:07 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #91

PopeOfNope wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision. Once…

TL;DR: “Our way of life is under attack by all those mobs of non-straight, non-white, non-males.”

Look at the people making the accusations. They're all straight, white men. Socialists are typically upper middle class straight white men. Nice try painting me as racist, sexist or homophobic, though.

Look at the twitter hashtag #notyourshield. The PC hatemob isn't liked by women, people of color or LGBT. They tend to dislike straight, white men telling them what it's like to be black, female or gay.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#96

Post by dang » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:10 PM UTC

jpt4 wrote: post #75

leereeves wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous submission was #1 on the front page for a few minutes before it was flag killed. It wasn't overtly racist or filled with profanity; perhaps some people just wanted to silence it.

To indulge in a bit of tinfoil-hatting re "some people just wanted to silence it": Tlon, Corp., the Red Hat to Urbit's Fedora, rejected Y-Combinator funding last year.

If you're implying that we'd censor an HN post because of some arcane YC-related detail, that's false. None of the people who work on HN have any knowledge of what you're referring to. We haven't the cycles to keep track of such things even if we wanted to—our hands are rather full—and they'd play no role in HN moderation if we did.

The post in question was downweighted by user flags. The only thing we did was unkill it so an ongoing discussion (such as it was) could continue, which is standard practice.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#97

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

devalier wrote: post #53

antics wrote: post #43

I recently helped organize a conference. Since it is apparently not obvious to many people, I'd just like to point out that amongst conference organizers, it is an extremely common belief that your primary responsibility is to deliver a good conference experience to your conference-goers. This is not just a belief StrangeLoop holds -- it is a belief that many beloved tech conferences have (e.g., PyCon), and if you th…

It would be fine to ban Curtis if his talk was about his politics. It would be fine to ban him if he did not agree to abide by the code of conduct. The conference obviously does not owe him a platform to discuss his politics. 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 ha…

What have you learned by reading the Urbit code? I found it impenetrable, but didn't try very hard to decode it.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#98

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #78

devalier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be fine to ban Curtis if his talk was about his politics. It would be fine to ban him if he did not agree to abide by the code of conduct. The conference obviously does not owe him a platform to discuss his politics. 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 ha…

BTW, Urbit has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer. I don't know if that was to be discussed in this particular talk (usually the Nock/Hoon stuff is so weird people never get to the rest), but if Yarvin/Moldbug can't keep political rants out of his documentation then I think it's fair to consider the politics as part of the technology.

You could probably expand on this a bit.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#99

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

devalier wrote: post #67

antics wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

You are right of course. From a business standpoint, Alex did the right thing and he will not suffer consequences. Other conferences have done the same and will continue to do so. This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend. Individual action by people like me will not stop it.

My guess is, there will be consequences, and they will mostly work to Strange Loop's benefit. Strange Loop actually got marginally more interesting to me after this drama.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#100

Post by lkrubner » Sun, Jun 07, 2015, 10:24 PM UTC

An analogy can be made here to the famous case of Michael Servetus. Please note that I am not saying that Curtis Yarvin is the most important scientist of our era. I'm not suggesting that Curtis Yarvin is necessarily of unusual brilliance. He could easily be wrong regarding all of his political writing. This is just an analogy.

Servetus had a lot of unusual ideas. He was a fantastic medical researcher, and, in 1533, he was the first to publish the idea that the heart was the center of a circulatory system, which pumped blood throughout the body. He also decided the Doctrine Of The Trinity (that the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost were 3 aspects of one god) was entirely false. Therefore he was arrested and put to death, and thus Europe lost one of the greatest medical researchers of the 1500s.

You might ask, what is the connection between the pulmonary system, and the the Doctrine Of The Trinity? There is none, save that creative people tend to have original ideas in several areas. If you want the benefits that derive from allowing creative people to have original thoughts, you have to also pay the price, and the price is that they sometimes have ideas that make people uncomfortable.

Where 2 subjects overlap, such as math and computer programming, then a grave error in one area might call into question a person's expertise in that other subject. But where 2 subjects do not overlap, then errors in one area do not necessarily bring into question the person's expertise in the unrelated subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus