So, a question: now that Alex Miller's activities outside of the technical content of Strangeloop - I.E., banning a presenter over his personal politics - have created such a large distraction from the technical content that is to be presented at Stangeloop, will he be stepping down?
Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
121–130 of 194 posts
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#122Thought experiment: is there any extremity of leftist (or progressive if you prefer) thinking (say, on a personal blog) that could conceivably get one disinvited to speak on a technical topic at a conference of this sort?
Some of the people who purged Yarvin are Stalinists, so I'm going to go with "no."
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#123http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement Ken is the free speech Popehat, Clark is the ... lesser Popehat.
You might want to try using an argument of some sort next time.
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#124In this context, I think it's worth reading the article "The Curious Case of Mencius Moldbug" at Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/cur...
If anyone is wondering about the actual views and arguments of Moldbug and his neoreactionaries, they were covered and responded to by economist blogger Noah Smith here. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/neoreactionaries.... The crux of it (and something I never saw quite covered in all the essays bouncing around) is "Essentially, neoreaction is the dream of a society of mostly white people, living in a hier…
And? The question is not "how fringe is Yarvin's politics," the question is "does the fact that he has fringe politics mean he should be kicked out of a conference where he would not be speaking about politics."
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#125In case you were wondering what Curtis's talk might have been about (and whether it would have held any technical merit) this page has a link to Clark's earlier introduction to Urbit: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-... The "Exit, voice, and loyalty" terminology might seem odd if you don't know it's origins. It's from 1970 book by economist A. O. Hirschman that's coming back in popularity:…
Do those who support Curtis appearing at the talk (wisely?) refrain from posting out of (legitimate?) fear of career repercussion? This. It also has the perverse effect of leaving the defense of "racists" to actual racists (e.g., [1]), thereby leading to guilt by association: "See, only racists are willing to defend this guy, so he's obviously a racist!" [1]: https://twitter.com/B8GodDante/status/607201146017615872
More recently, perhaps within the past year or two, I've been seeing online a polarization and evaporative cooling effect in action. There doesn't seem to be as much middle ground and nuance as there has been in the past. Any support or acceptance for an officially disapproved entity is tantamount to total or unqualified support or acceptance.
Many moderates - in this case, moderate supporters of Yarvin, as shown in the comments here - appear to be fearful of getting tarred with the scarlet "R" and facing career threat. The scarlet "S" and "M" are also significant.
In contrast, the "C" is not threatened nowadays, if it ever was. Left-wing extremism is given a pass, while right-wing extremism is always tarred with the "R" brush. People rarely use the "F" word - they just default to "R", which is far more damaging.
(I mean: racist / sexist / misogynist / communist / fascist above.)
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#126In case you were wondering what Curtis's talk might have been about (and whether it would have held any technical merit) this page has a link to Clark's earlier introduction to Urbit: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-... The "Exit, voice, and loyalty" terminology might seem odd if you don't know it's origins. It's from 1970 book by economist A. O. Hirschman that's coming back in popularity:…
Do those who support Curtis appearing at the talk refrain from posting out of fear of career repercussion? No and yes. I have been pretty vocal about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/606474432509394944 https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/606673594198794240 but I've also been sitting on a 75%-written blog post that I'm hesitant to actually post. Not because of career repercussions (I have never had a…
It's not like there's an actual policy that Yarvin violated that I can be confident I'm on the right side of.
This is the bigger issue - the chilling of all controversial views and debate.
It's less about "violated Rule XXIV, subsection (c) of the Code of Conduct" and more about "wrote some stuff that made us feel funny and we're worried that something awkward might happen at the meeting". Yes, the organizers have the power to rewrite the schedule for bad reasons or no reason at all. But it's important to point out what was done, and why we think it was done.
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that the mental machinery is as elastic as you say. Our bodies to indeed adjust to mental stress, in fact parts of the brain that respond to fear and stress will overdevelop in relation to other areas producing aberrant behavior. There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to. I take your point abo…
Physical analogies are dated when we have accurate terms now. "There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to." I'm not so sure about this. Stress happens because of stress hormones. You can develop a tolerance to those hormones like you could develop a tolerance to any drug. The range of experiences that human…
And mental trauma from torture or combat that leads to suicide?
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think in Chomsky's case his work in linguistics actually overshadows his political work because he is so foundational. I wonder how popular Chomsky's radical left views actually are among techies...assuming what I hear about libertarian views being prevalent...its not necessarily a natural fit.
> he is so foundational. And somewhat discredited at this point? I don't care to write up a bunch, but his ideas about universal grammar built on genetic properties have not fared well over the years. I know he's done other stuff, but that seems his main claim to fame, excluding the political stuff.
I'm not a linguist but he seems to get a large amount of credit in that area.
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#129This whole concept of paying attention to fellow techies' political views is weird to me. The concept of caring about them to this degree is even weirder. Politics is a common topic here, of course. I've participated in my share of such discussions. But I couldn't tell you who took what position. I'd definitely never look at a prospective conference speaker and say, oh, that's the guy who believes X, where X is any p…
Is this a real thing? This conversation feels like a window into an alternate universe.
I'm with you there.
I've helped organize a couple of small regional meetings, and I have literally zero idea what the political leanings of the speakers or attendees were. Nor did I care.
If someone were into radical politics in his free time, that would be his own business. If any of the speakers had veered off into unrelated violent or rude speech (e.g. racism, calling for war, political uprising, etc) at the podium, for a technical talk, that would be addressed on the spot. (I've never seen this happen.)
Re: Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin)
#130Even though I'm deliciously close to 200 karma I'm going to ask this anyway... If someone has a view that is actually destructive for the forum its aired in ( I'm speaking hypothetically now ) does it have to be accommodated. By that, and I genuinely want to know what you guys think, what if a political candidate advocated the end of democratic elections? A "one man, one vote, one time" kind of thing. How is that han…
Extreme conservative opinions like Mr Yarvins are actually shocking to me. I don't think his particular writings should be banned or anything like that. However, are they so reactionary as to represent to the organizers a position that they don't want to even tacitly or obliquely endorse?
Given that the reaction of the organizers was to remove Yarvin's talk, with extremely vague justifications, I think both sides could agree that the answer to this question is "yes".