Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

s3.amazonaws.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 443 posts

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

#201

Post by steveklabnik »

overgard wrote: post #191
steveklabnik wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I disagree with this. Furthermore, _certain_ views merit more consideration than others, especially with regards to something like a conference, see raganwald's comment elsewhere in this thread about conferences being cultural. Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don'…

> Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I disagree with this. I find that perspective strange. Machinery does not particularly care what end it's put to. > Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and ins…

> you try to minimize your association

I did not, I am saying that when you claim I'm putting in a lot of effort to dig through someone's history, that's wrong.

> you took the effort to get him banned from speaking

If by 'took the effort' you mean 'sent a few dozen tweets over a few hours', then sure, that's effort. I didn't even particularly strongly argue that he should be banned, though I am certainly happy about the outcome here. I never even directly contacted the organizers, just stated my opinion in public, just as you're doing here.

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

#202

Post by urbit »

al3x wrote: post #151
overgard wrote: post #134

I'm sort of baffled by this: why would anyone care if he's giving a tech talk? It reminds me of the Brendan Eich situation. I disagree with his political views, but also.. who gives a shit? It's immaterial to the job. I used to read moldbug and I thought he was really incisive for a while, but his blog kept getting more and more, uh, esoteric. (basically unreadable -- it got hard to figure out what point he was even…

There were a number of people who voiced their objections on Twitter. It's easy to ask the rhetorical question here, but if you really want an answer, go check out what they said. In particular, people who represent groups that Moldbug treats as subhuman in his writing expressed concern and dismay. Perhaps looking through their eyes for a moment might illuminate why a person would care.

Ironically, the St. Louis hacker who first suggested urbit would be a great fit for Strange Loop (hi Justin!) is an African-American.

An obsession with collective identity and collective characteristics - all proletarians are noble, all Germans are masters, all rednecks are racists, etc, etc - is common, perhaps for obvious reasons, in the democratic era. And in particular, all parties responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century - Nazi and Communist alike - were thinking very much this way.

This insistence on generalization would seem very strange to most of our ancestors, who would find the leap from collective differences to collective uniformity quite irrational. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey, who governed England for Henry VIII, was a butcher's son. Englishmen of his time did not find this at all strange, though hardly any of them agreed that nobles and butchers were statistically identical.

Also, for some reason which is perhaps less obvious, not all of us have to "represent groups." It does not seem likely that either Alex Payne or Alex Miller sees himself as representing white males, for instance. Perhaps this freedom to see oneself as just an individual is the most subtle form of privilege - but I think everyone should have it.

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

#203

Post by gwern »

13thLetter wrote: post #141
obstinate wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

Why read an article _about_ him, as opposed to reading what he actually said? Are you concerned about contracting wrongthink?

Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.

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

#204

Post by tptacek »

hibikir wrote: post #187
k_brother wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're drawing. However, it seems to be the consensus. [edit: I see that there are secondary sources — but I'm curious about a primary source. Shouldn't that be the most important?]

It's pretty difficult. Racism, like other ideas that at some point were not considered unacceptable in public, is nowadays covered in what we could call Hermetic writing: In other words, instead of saying what they really want to say, a racist says things that imply they are OK with racism. A way that you can find all over his writings is talk about how people and businesses should be free to refuse dealing with peop…

Edit: It seems to me like Yarvin is pretty overt about the racial stuff. His isn't a Rand Paul-ian "we don't need the Civil Rights Act, let the market take care of it" posture, but rather one that leans heavily on the just-world hypothesis to draw conclusions about the inferiority of Africans.

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

#205

Post by tptacek »

obstinate wrote: post #198
steveklabnik wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As, I would imagine, the professed beliefs of many on HN, yet here we are.

When it comes to reactionary beliefs, there is a significant contingent on this site that believes one ought to be able to hold them publically with no consequences in any other space. This happened with that Mozilla CEO that resigned, the scientist who wore the shirt with scantily clad women on it, and a number of other situations where the privileged paid nominal costs for their mistakes. It is very upsetting to a…

Being disinvited from a conference after a writing career that left you most notable for your politics is not the same as being removed from your job over a political position that people had to do research to discover.

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

#206

Post by topynate »

tptacek wrote: post #192
topynate wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few quick questions: 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 eith…

I'm not sure how this is a fair question to ask Klabnik, since the issue in Yarvin's case isn't whether somewhat obscure namedropped French philosophers think his views are racist. Edit: It seems to me like there's no controversy about whether Yarvin's views are racist; it's barely controversial to suggest that he's a white supremacist (if that's something he wants to distance himself from, he's done himself no favor…

I assure you that the racism of, for example, Yitzhak Herzog (who heads Israel's main centre-left party), is as obvious to the ideological opponents of Zionism as Yarvin's is to you. If you doubt me, ask them.

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.)

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

#207

Post by dang »

MichaelGG wrote: post #176
dang wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it acceptable to flag such things? I only flag such articles because the discussion quality tends to be really low. There's little insight in the comments. While they may be important topics, and I'm sure some folks have interesting ideas, the results don't seem very useful.

Yes, that's an acceptable reason to flag such things, and many HN users do.

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

#208

Post by tptacek »

topynate wrote: post #206
tptacek wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how this is a fair question to ask Klabnik, since the issue in Yarvin's case isn't whether somewhat obscure namedropped French philosophers think his views are racist. Edit: It seems to me like there's no controversy about whether Yarvin's views are racist; it's barely controversial to suggest that he's a white supremacist (if that's something he wants to distance himself from, he's done himself no favor…

I assure you that the racism of, for example, Yitzhak Herzog (who heads Israel's main centre-left party), is as obvious to the ideological opponents of Zionism as Yarvin's is to you. If you doubt me, ask them. 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 r…

If I Google your name, am I going to find a very well known blog in which you repeatedly and at length argue about the inferiority of Palestinians as a race? No? Then, again, not sure what your Zionism point has to do with anything.

Strange Loop has a blind review system?

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

#209

Post by leereeves »

tptacek wrote: post #183
leereeves wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of him either. Now we have. If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas". I'd imagine the goal is something more like "not allowing the experience of conference attendees to be made a little less pleasant in the service of what is a quirky and maybe interesting but probably pretty marginal technical talk".

Allowing some to have a more pleasant experience by excluding others...

Once upon a time, liberals argued against that.

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

#210

Post by chao- »

tomjen3 wrote: post #90
leereeves wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of extremist attacks a child because of their father's political views?

Somebody who believes in their cause. While I wouldn't take it out on a child, I won't want to associate with somebody who was against gay marriage or try to save somebody who was against women's rights to their own bodies. I feel that anybody who spends time with the people they strongly disagree with, when they don't have to, lack a moral backbone.

Do you also feel the intense sense of extremely partisan, political divide in the US is desirable? Because that is what results from holing up in ideologically segregated communities where everyone agrees about nine-tenths of everything, and where one only encounters their political other in the form of a media caricature.
Post reply on HN