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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 conferen

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.
    - 13thLetter 11y ago
      It's interesting how the people crowing "Free market in ideas! Free market in ideas!" tend to be opposed to free markets in almost any other context. How many of the people enforcing the thoughtcrime laws are self-proclaimed socialists, or Communists, or "Jacobins"?
wmf 11y ago
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.
- urbit 11y ago
  Hard-coded into the network layer? Not only is this not true, I can't even imagine how it could be true...
- tptacek 11y ago
  You could probably expand on this a bit.
- A_COMPUTER 11y ago
  True, but meaningless. Any OS that has the concept of a root or admin user with total control has monarchy hard-coded into it too.
  - Rangi42 11y ago
    Which is not actually meaningless. Technical features like "root user" or "wheel group of root-capable users" have political implications. From `info su` [0]: > Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.) > However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers. > I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. — Richard Stallman My understanding of Urbit comes mostly from this writeup on Popehat [1] and an initial foray into the documentation of Nock and Hoon. However, the impression that I get of it enabling encrypted, distributed programs, does mirror Yarvin's proposed "Patchwork" system of nation-states [2], in the same way that a single root user mirrors a monarchy, and with analogous pros and cons between the technical and political systems. [0]: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-not-creating-the-wheel-group-by-default http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-n... [1]: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matters/ http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-... [2]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwo...
tptacek 11y ago
What have you learned by reading the Urbit code? I found it impenetrable, but didn't try very hard to decode it.
- devalier 11y ago
  It wasn't the code itself that I learned from. I have more been enriched and stimulated by reading the blog posts, documentation, hacker news threads, and mailing list. A couple of the more interesting ideas are: * He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the next thousand years. * His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today. It's hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I said to myself, "Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder if he'll be able to make it work."
al3x 11y ago
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 individual who operates in bad faith. > "And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them?" Pick up a paper. Do you think our society lacks an ongoing discussion of the repercussions of racism? Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending – that people of some ethnic backgrounds are subhuman and fit only for slavery – were roundly rejected by society decades ago. Including him would be pandering to a common denominator so low it barely even registers today. > "Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience" As I suggested to another commenter: why don't you take a look at who was asking Yarvin's dismissal on Twitter and inquire with them as to whether they would describe themselves as "thin-skinned". Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event. It's easy to characterize the hypothetical "other" in your head. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?
- devalier 11y ago
  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-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w... I believe his critique to be accurate. There is nothing wrong with invective when it is true. Surely you are no stranger to invective against people who you think are in the wrong. Moldbug has always been someone who can both dish it and take it. Science and technology are moved forward via heated competition of people who are furiously working to prove that the other guy is full of crap, and that they have the true answer. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards? Thin-skinned is not a synonym for coward. Cowards say: "thank you sir, may I have another." People are thin-skinned because they think they can get their way if they make a fuss. Which they did. I have no interest in saying anything to their face, because they are strong, and I am weak. As for the racism question...I have a proposal for you. Can we make you dictator of an American city? Yes you, Alex Payne. We could shoot for Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or even my current city of Cleveland. If you are not the imperious type, we could just take the entire Jacobin board of directors, and make them the trustees of the city, and have you guys appoint a suitable executive. As plenary rulers, you get full power to root out racism, correct inequalities, reduce homicide rates back to what they were in 1905, restore the rotting and decaying buildings, solve the wealth gap between the sexes, the races, and the classes, once and for all. You get to reorganize the police, fix the schools, and do whatever else you think is necessary. We'll give you lots of time. How much do you need? 20 years, 30 years, 50 years? That is fine. I'm not actually joking about this. If you want this deal, we can talk about how to make it happen. It won't happen overnight, but I think a lot on the right would actually be amenable to this. You win, we lose. We take the knee, you rule. Seriously. You're going to win any way. As you say, Curtis's views were already soundly rejected. If you're going to win, I would rather have it all above board, so that if your plans fail to restore our cities, then at least you can't blame the wreckers, you can't say that you're ideas weren't truly implemented, etc. And hey, maybe you'll succeed and that'll be awesome. Either way, it is better for everyone if we just formalize the relationship and acknowledge that you are in charge. So what do you say?

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.
  - 13thLetter 11y ago
    It's interesting how the people crowing "Free market in ideas! Free market in ideas!" tend to be opposed to free markets in almost any other context. How many of the people enforcing the thoughtcrime laws are self-proclaimed socialists, or Communists, or "Jacobins"?

wmf 11y ago

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.

urbit 11y ago
Hard-coded into the network layer? Not only is this not true, I can't even imagine how it could be true...
tptacek 11y ago
You could probably expand on this a bit.
A_COMPUTER 11y ago
True, but meaningless. Any OS that has the concept of a root or admin user with total control has monarchy hard-coded into it too.
- Rangi42 11y ago
  Which is not actually meaningless. Technical features like "root user" or "wheel group of root-capable users" have political implications. From `info su` [0]: > Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.) > However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers. > I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. — Richard Stallman My understanding of Urbit comes mostly from this writeup on Popehat [1] and an initial foray into the documentation of Nock and Hoon. However, the impression that I get of it enabling encrypted, distributed programs, does mirror Yarvin's proposed "Patchwork" system of nation-states [2], in the same way that a single root user mirrors a monarchy, and with analogous pros and cons between the technical and political systems. [0]: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-not-creating-the-wheel-group-by-default http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4460/why-is-debian-n... [1]: http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-why-urbit-matters/ http://popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vulcans-... [2]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/11/patchwo...

tptacek 11y ago

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

devalier 11y ago
It wasn't the code itself that I learned from. I have more been enriched and stimulated by reading the blog posts, documentation, hacker news threads, and mailing list. A couple of the more interesting ideas are: * He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the next thousand years. * His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today. It's hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I said to myself, "Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder if he'll be able to make it work."

al3x 11y ago

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 individual who operates in bad faith. > "And how are we supposed to correct problems in society if we cannot talk honestly about them?" Pick up a paper. Do you think our society lacks an ongoing discussion of the repercussions of racism? Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending – that people of some ethnic backgrounds are subhuman and fit only for slavery – were roundly rejected by society decades ago. Including him would be pandering to a common denominator so low it barely even registers today. > "Now maybe Alex wishes to cater to the more thin-skinned in his audience" As I suggested to another commenter: why don't you take a look at who was asking Yarvin's dismissal on Twitter and inquire with them as to whether they would describe themselves as "thin-skinned". Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event. It's easy to characterize the hypothetical "other" in your head. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards?

devalier 11y ago
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-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w... I believe his critique to be accurate. There is nothing wrong with invective when it is true. Surely you are no stranger to invective against people who you think are in the wrong. Moldbug has always been someone who can both dish it and take it. Science and technology are moved forward via heated competition of people who are furiously working to prove that the other guy is full of crap, and that they have the true answer. Why not test your own thick skin and look them in the eye when you call them cowards? Thin-skinned is not a synonym for coward. Cowards say: "thank you sir, may I have another." People are thin-skinned because they think they can get their way if they make a fuss. Which they did. I have no interest in saying anything to their face, because they are strong, and I am weak. As for the racism question...I have a proposal for you. Can we make you dictator of an American city? Yes you, Alex Payne. We could shoot for Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or St. Louis, or even my current city of Cleveland. If you are not the imperious type, we could just take the entire Jacobin board of directors, and make them the trustees of the city, and have you guys appoint a suitable executive. As plenary rulers, you get full power to root out racism, correct inequalities, reduce homicide rates back to what they were in 1905, restore the rotting and decaying buildings, solve the wealth gap between the sexes, the races, and the classes, once and for all. You get to reorganize the police, fix the schools, and do whatever else you think is necessary. We'll give you lots of time. How much do you need? 20 years, 30 years, 50 years? That is fine. I'm not actually joking about this. If you want this deal, we can talk about how to make it happen. It won't happen overnight, but I think a lot on the right would actually be amenable to this. You win, we lose. We take the knee, you rule. Seriously. You're going to win any way. As you say, Curtis's views were already soundly rejected. If you're going to win, I would rather have it all above board, so that if your plans fail to restore our cities, then at least you can't blame the wreckers, you can't say that you're ideas weren't truly implemented, etc. And hey, maybe you'll succeed and that'll be awesome. Either way, it is better for everyone if we just formalize the relationship and acknowledge that you are in charge. So what do you say?