“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”

#281

Post by sudioStudio64 » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 11:42 AM UTC

yarvin9 wrote: post #263

tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "politically correct" comes directly from the quote, as does African genetic predisposition for slavery. It's also not an isolated, out-of-context quote. For instance, it's easy to find Moldbug holding forth about the evils of South African apartheid abolition.

It's easy to find South Africans "holding forth" etc. For example: [0]. "The number of black people who believe life was better under South Africa's apartheid regime is growing, according to a survey published yesterday... In a rebuke to the African National Congress government, more than 60 per cent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule." Yes, that's from 2002. Every…

You aren't trying to say then that the colonial powers assumed control of Africa to stop rape?

If I'm doing a wrong thing should I stop doing that wrong thing even if someone else might do something wrong after I quit?

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

#282

Post by sudioStudio64 » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 12:29 PM UTC

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #212

Is that guy still a thing?

What I mean was that I hadn't heard anything about the Neo-reactionaries for over a year! Damn it with the downvotes!

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

#283

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 1:04 PM UTC

gclaramunt wrote: post #105

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

I wonder - suppose someone Alex Miller agreed with, but who also caused controversy, was met with opposition by folks who disliked her. For example, suppose a bunch of gamergate types were to complain about Brianna Wu giving a purely technical talk about pathfinding and AI. Would all the folks who are so quick to defend Strangeloop also defend it in this case? Somehow I doubt it.

In the same vein I would love to see the people defending the talk arguing in favor of a Noam Chomsky presentation

I would absolutely defend Noam Chomsky's right to give a talk on, e.g., context free grammars.

Strangely, neoreactionary and libertarian types aren't so aggressive at shutting down debate. It's almost as if they feel they can win in the marketplace of ideas.

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

#284

Post by riverc » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

smitherfield wrote: post #261

yarvin9 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom agree with me on anything, have worked on the project. The word "racist" and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s - see Peter Frost's cultural history [0]. If you asked Shakespeare if he was a "racist," he would not know what you meant. "Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied t…

"Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied to itself. To be a little pedantic, that's not strictly true; as Frost points out, "racist" was originally intended as a literal translation of the German völkisch , which the Nazi Party certainly self-described as. But I suppose you could say that's the exception which proves the rule.

A similar point applies to the term 'Christian' and to the term 'Monarchist' - whereas it would be interesting to see the etymology of Marxist, Socialist or Communist.

'Capitalist' has the same issue, interestingly.

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

#285

Post by Grue3 » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 1:14 PM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #120

PopeOfNope wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? Marxism happened. Limiting speech has always been a tactic employed by the political left. Words like "racist", "sexist" and "homophobe" were designed to shut down free speech. It's extremely effective at silencing any opposition.

marxism has very little to do with racism, sexism or homophobia

It correlates pretty strongly. See, USSR, Maoist China, and so on.

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

#286

Post by hga » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #285

nyolfen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

marxism has very little to do with racism, sexism or homophobia

It correlates pretty strongly. See, USSR, Maoist China, and so on.

As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.

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

#287

Post by topynate » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 1:59 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #286

Grue3 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It correlates pretty strongly. See, USSR, Maoist China, and so on.

As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Certainly true as a matter of those states' fundamental hypocrisy, but I believe PopeOfNope was referring to the Left's deployment of those terms as offensive weapons - which also happened. For example, the USSR was very big on paying lip-service to anti-colonialism as a form of soft power over the non-aligned block[1]. This did not seem to noticeably affect her behaviour towards Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghan War[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War

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

#288

Post by hga » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 2:02 PM UTC

devalier wrote: post #249

al3x wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a friend texted me this morning: "the talk on Urbit could have been dismissed on technical grounds". Perhaps it's interesting to you, but it brings very little that's new to the table in terms of research. Urbit's author, meanwhile, has had nothing but invective for people doing valuable research in the relevant sub-fields of compsci that his work touches upon. Purely from a technology perspective, this in an indi…

Urbit's author, meanwhile, has had nothing but invective for people doing valuable research in the relevant sub-fields of comp-sci that his work touches upon. Purely from a technology perspective, this in an individual who operates in bad faith. 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…

Thanks for that link to his criticism of institutional CS, it gets me firmly into territory where I can apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia principle. Upon which I find the thesis sorely lacking, if you accept the principle as discussed in the comments that it's OK for research to be "wasteful" as long as "1%" of it turns out to be useful, especially in the long term (e.g. I do not accept that all interesting computing is going to limited to the context of the current context of the cloud and supercomputers masquerading as smart phones ("mobile"; I started my computing career in 1977, when the 90 MHz Cray 1 was the pinnacle of number crunching, although I have to confess that I don't know the 64 bit floating point performance of typical smartphone ARM CPUs)).

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.

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

#289

Post by zimpenfish » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 2:04 PM UTC

saryant wrote: post #102

tomjen3 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does shunning someone for their political beliefs help advance your own beliefs? Seriously. Refusing to professionally engage with someone due to private political beliefs will do nothing but strengthen the resolve behind that belief. Instead of stepping across the battle lines into your exalted realm of enlightenment, they will circle the wagons and reload the muskets. What if Tolkien had refused to befriend CS…

I have a vague memory of some research recently (last few months) that showed it was nigh-on impossible to persuade most people of a contrary position to one they held. In fact, it helped to strengthen their existing beliefs.

But my google-fu/pocket-fu is weak and I can't currently find it.

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

#290

Post by convexfunction » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 2:09 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #274

escape_goat wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your counter-arguments are very bad. I thank you for sharing them here, because I don't think they reflect uncommon opinions at all, and I think they are too easily accepted without reflection. With regards to the "defend to the death your right to say it" hyperbole, I agree that it is overstated. Furthermore, it is true that getting dis-invited from a tech conference does not involve losing the right to say…

This is a slippery slope fallacy. It turns out that in reality we are quite capable of allowing tech conferences to choose their presenters and to disallow presenters who have made uncomfortably racist comments without ending up at the point where it has a chilling effect on other types of speech.

"Right side of history", "moral arc of the universe", etc. seems to suggest that the people becoming uncomfortable think it's a slippery slope too.