6 ms·

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 i

by antics 11y ago

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 think this can't happen at your conference, you are likely in for a surprise when/if something rough happens to that venue. In fact, this claim is stronger than you might think. This belief is prominently reflected in pretty much every decision every conference makes. People choose codes of conduct to deliberately exclude some people and certain behavior. They make you "apply" to go to their conferences so that they can hand-pick attendees to fit whatever criteria they have for their crowds (e.g., xoxo). People select talks and their speakers to fit profiles they want. And so on. I can name on my hand the number of people I've met who organize conferences, who believe their job is to provide a fair platform ideas. It's just not the way people seem to think.

devalier 11y ago
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 have applied to my own programming. So there are two big issues with the ban. First, Alex made the conference worse for all those who cared about technology and not politics. Second, he's given the PC-police a scalp. This will make it much harder for anyone to write good-faith but politically incorrect critiques even under a pseudonym, for fear that it could harm career prospects in the future. And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them? Most solutions to our problems are outside the Overton window - if they weren't we would have solved the problems already. Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience, rather than the technologists. That his prerogative. 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.
- antics 11y ago
  > 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 any time soon. A lot of important conferences would have done precisely the same thing. PyCon and xoxo to name two I know for certain. In fact, to be honest, I'd go much further. If you polled the organizers of these conference, I think they would probably mostly say that if you are the sort of person who thinks that the moldbug affair is a great piece of injustice, you probably won't fit in at the conference they are trying to create. Fundamentally these measures are made to exclude people like you from the bunch, and shunning the conferences won't make that go away -- I actually think this is the goal.
  - devalier 11y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      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.
    - sagichmal 11y ago
      > This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend. There is plainly nothing lamentable about a private enterprise opting out of suffering a fool a platform. This is literally the market of free ideas at work: if you hold detestable opinions, you may find yourself unwelcome in many places.
      - 11y ago
convexfunction 11y ago
There are probably lots of people who need to hear this, and given the people who'll be attending and made it clear how much of a fuss they would make, it was obviously the right call to disinvite him. I think it's still worth briefly lamenting that our culture is heading in this direction. I see more and more echoes of the worldview and tactics that ultimately killed just shy of a hundred million people or so last century, and yes, it scares me. Do you have any thoughts you'd be disinvited via public pressure from the best conferences for having? Will you in the culture of twenty or thirty years from now? Grist for the mill.
- paxdickinson 11y ago
  FWIW I only saw two twitter comments complaining before the disinvitation, and one of those was proud communist Steve Klabnik.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    A few things. I was not planning on getting involved in this conversation, but since dang decided to un-flag it, I'm going to leave one or two comments, but don't plan on sticking around very much. As tptacek said elsewhere in this thread, politics + HN == nightmare. First of all, many more people complained than me. You didn't look very hard. Second, I'm not _strictly_ a communist: I'm certainly very left-wing, and I often role-play a communist, because I think Americans need a connection to an actual left. My allegiance is ultimately to Deleuze, not Marx. To put it in terms of a meme image I saw the other day, around non-leftists, I usually use 'communist' as a shorthand, but amongst leftists, a more nuanced discussions can be had, for sure. EDIT: ahh, here we go: http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS Finally, since you're dragging personal views into this, I'll just leave this here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-new-tech-bro-nightmare-1280336916 http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...
    - topynate 11y ago
      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 either my views or those people's intensity of repugnance for them is insufficient to get me kicked? If so, then as there are by far more racists of the Zionist stripe likely to attend, shouldn't you be looking into that? Why aren't you?
aestetix 11y ago
I have helped organize many conferences, including some that had >2000 attendees. And including conferences that had unpopular speakers. I think it's important to understand that inviting someone to speak does not mean you endorse what they say. If that were true, if a conference held a debate on opposing views, which view should the conference be endorsing? The conference serves as the messenger, not the message. The traditional way to handle these issues is to have a complaint procedure. Either an email address, or even someone at the event who can handle such complaints. Keep in mind, attendees are under no obligation to go to every talk, so if you want to enjoy the event, you are welcome to simply not go to the talk you don't like. In terms of the situation in question, by virtue of this action, StrangeLoop has now become a political conference, whether they wanted to or not. I am unclear on how their speaker selection process will change going forward. If I decide to submit a talk, do I need to worry that, after I arrange all my travel and such, that I will be dis-invited because of statements I have made in an unrelated venue? I fully support the right of a conference to select who their speakers are, but when they use criteria unrelated to their stated mission, it does change the perception of the event.
- theorique 11y ago
  This is a perfectly sensible way to do things. The concept that a person's politics is so "evil" that their talk acceptance must be rescinded is, frankly, childish. It treats attendees like small children, who can't rationally deal with the situation of a person with opposing views. Of course, if a person promises to speak on a technical topic, and then goes on a political rant, that's a reason to shut them down or walk out: the audience isn't getting what was expected and promised. But the mere fact of a person's unrelated political views being used to remove them from a speakers list - this is the sort of thing that you would expect from the USSR.

by antics 11y ago

devalier 11y ago

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 have applied to my own programming. So there are two big issues with the ban. First, Alex made the conference worse for all those who cared about technology and not politics. Second, he's given the PC-police a scalp. This will make it much harder for anyone to write good-faith but politically incorrect critiques even under a pseudonym, for fear that it could harm career prospects in the future. And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them? Most solutions to our problems are outside the Overton window - if they weren't we would have solved the problems already. Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience, rather than the technologists. That his prerogative. 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.

antics 11y ago
> 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 any time soon. A lot of important conferences would have done precisely the same thing. PyCon and xoxo to name two I know for certain. In fact, to be honest, I'd go much further. If you polled the organizers of these conference, I think they would probably mostly say that if you are the sort of person who thinks that the moldbug affair is a great piece of injustice, you probably won't fit in at the conference they are trying to create. Fundamentally these measures are made to exclude people like you from the bunch, and shunning the conferences won't make that go away -- I actually think this is the goal.
- devalier 11y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    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.
  - sagichmal 11y ago
    > This is part of a lamentable, ongoing trend. There is plainly nothing lamentable about a private enterprise opting out of suffering a fool a platform. This is literally the market of free ideas at work: if you hold detestable opinions, you may find yourself unwelcome in many places.
    - 11y ago

convexfunction 11y ago

There are probably lots of people who need to hear this, and given the people who'll be attending and made it clear how much of a fuss they would make, it was obviously the right call to disinvite him. I think it's still worth briefly lamenting that our culture is heading in this direction. I see more and more echoes of the worldview and tactics that ultimately killed just shy of a hundred million people or so last century, and yes, it scares me. Do you have any thoughts you'd be disinvited via public pressure from the best conferences for having? Will you in the culture of twenty or thirty years from now? Grist for the mill.

paxdickinson 11y ago
FWIW I only saw two twitter comments complaining before the disinvitation, and one of those was proud communist Steve Klabnik.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  A few things. I was not planning on getting involved in this conversation, but since dang decided to un-flag it, I'm going to leave one or two comments, but don't plan on sticking around very much. As tptacek said elsewhere in this thread, politics + HN == nightmare. First of all, many more people complained than me. You didn't look very hard. Second, I'm not _strictly_ a communist: I'm certainly very left-wing, and I often role-play a communist, because I think Americans need a connection to an actual left. My allegiance is ultimately to Deleuze, not Marx. To put it in terms of a meme image I saw the other day, around non-leftists, I usually use 'communist' as a shorthand, but amongst leftists, a more nuanced discussions can be had, for sure. EDIT: ahh, here we go: http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS http://m.imgur.com/r/FULLCOMMUNISM/MLlIQAS Finally, since you're dragging personal views into this, I'll just leave this here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-new-tech-bro-nightmare-1280336916 http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne...
  - topynate 11y ago
    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 either my views or those people's intensity of repugnance for them is insufficient to get me kicked? If so, then as there are by far more racists of the Zionist stripe likely to attend, shouldn't you be looking into that? Why aren't you?

aestetix 11y ago

I have helped organize many conferences, including some that had >2000 attendees. And including conferences that had unpopular speakers. I think it's important to understand that inviting someone to speak does not mean you endorse what they say. If that were true, if a conference held a debate on opposing views, which view should the conference be endorsing? The conference serves as the messenger, not the message. The traditional way to handle these issues is to have a complaint procedure. Either an email address, or even someone at the event who can handle such complaints. Keep in mind, attendees are under no obligation to go to every talk, so if you want to enjoy the event, you are welcome to simply not go to the talk you don't like. In terms of the situation in question, by virtue of this action, StrangeLoop has now become a political conference, whether they wanted to or not. I am unclear on how their speaker selection process will change going forward. If I decide to submit a talk, do I need to worry that, after I arrange all my travel and such, that I will be dis-invited because of statements I have made in an unrelated venue? I fully support the right of a conference to select who their speakers are, but when they use criteria unrelated to their stated mission, it does change the perception of the event.

theorique 11y ago
This is a perfectly sensible way to do things. The concept that a person's politics is so "evil" that their talk acceptance must be rescinded is, frankly, childish. It treats attendees like small children, who can't rationally deal with the situation of a person with opposing views. Of course, if a person promises to speak on a technical topic, and then goes on a political rant, that's a reason to shut them down or walk out: the audience isn't getting what was expected and promised. But the mere fact of a person's unrelated political views being used to remove them from a speakers list - this is the sort of thing that you would expect from the USSR.