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?
"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."
What a crazy coincidence. This talk was accepted when nobody knew who Yarvin was, but now that you and your friends want to cast him out into the wilderness for disagreeing with your political opinions, all of a sudden you realize that the talk was technically uninteresting anyway. What are the odds, huh?
"Moldbug has no place in this discussion because the views he's defending –"
Was he going to defend those views in his technical talk? If not, what's the problem?
"Better yet, try asking them in person the next time you cross paths at a tech event."
Not going to happen, because that would be defined as "harassment" and get the asker fired. You guys have the industry locked up real tight.
the views he's defending – that people of some ethnic backgrounds are subhuman and fit only for slavery
This is a lie. Moldbug has never defended such a view, and only a willful misreading of his work could possibly lead to this conclusion.
For the curious, let's have a taste of what Moldbug has actually written on the subject [1]. Its only sin would appear to be the use of the slightly archaic (but nonpejorative [2]) term "Negro":
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[T]he common meaning of racism implies the belief that ancestry is significant information in the context of common decisions about individuals.
It should be obvious that it is not. If you want to test a job applicant’s IQ, for example, give her an IQ test. Patterns of ancestry become useful only in decisions that affect large groups of humans in the aggregate. Governments, however, must often make such decisions.
Therefore, if you are an HNU [Human Neurological Uniformity] denialist and someone asks you whether you’re a racist, you can ask him if he implies the above belief, which we can call racial essentialism. (The Nazis, of course, were big essentialists.) If he says yes, tell him no. If he says no, you can tell him yes.
One also must be quite a bit more careful than Hume [quoted previously] with the words superior and inferior. This implies some quantitative ordering of overall personal worth, an idea one would expect Hume to be the last to accept. For example, consider the proposition that Jews tend to be better chess players than Negroes, whereas Negroes tend to be better dancers than Jews. Both halves of this statement may (or may not) be true, but neither can justify us in ranking the two races overall—unless our sole criterion of personal worth is either chess or dance. Which mine isn’t.
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 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.
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.
The political left in America were made enemies of the state during the era of McCarthyism. People's careers and personal lives were ruined during that Red Scare. That is "silencing". That is "limiting speech".
Who on the right today has been similarly "silenced"? If someone is called out for racism and then voluntarily chooses to exit public life or withdraw further commentary, that's their own cowardly choice. Being criticized does not "silence" anyone.
The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding. Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country. Far-right demagogues continue to fill newspapers, magazines, think tank briefing, the Internet, and airwaves with their ideas despite decades of criticism from the left.
The right in America has a political and media apparatus that far outstrips that of the left in funding.
The left has 99% of the university system including the entire Ivy league, which in total receives hundreds of billions of dollars in funding. The left also has most major media ranging from PBS and the NYTimes to CNN (although some are only partially under left-wing control, and will play cheerleader for war due to their own profit, not out of any right-wing ideology).
The only way you can define the "right" as being stronger is if you find the left-most country out there as being the true way, and anything less than that as being rightist. A better way to look at strength is to look at who has been winning the battles. If you look at the past 50 years, the left has won most of them. If you look at the past 100 years, overall, the nation has moved way left on virtually every single issue. There has been some back-and-forth on individual issues, but overall, the direction is very clear.
Worry not: hate is no danger of being silenced in this country.
I don't actually have a problem with silencing hateful people. But Curtis was never hateful to minorities. He is a good person trying to make an honest critique based on the evidence as he saw it. When you purge people like that, you only make your own movement and group stupider. And that is a problem, because if you cannot investigate the true causes of a social ill without forcing people to self-censor and avoid crime-think, then you can never fix the problems.
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.
Since we have you have you here, could you respond to the accusations of racist views that are being attributed to you? In particular, do you consider yourself to be "racist", and if so, what does this term mean to you?
I read your blog for years, and I never got that sense that you were advocating for personal or institutional discrimination against individuals on the basis of their race. Did I miss this point among all the others?
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 to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings - a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.
I actually like the answer given by Steve Klabnik above [1]. To call Steve a communist is a serious personal insult, and you can get banned for it [2]. However, Steve reserves the right to call himself a communist, or not, as he likes. This is actually kind of cool...
"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.
völkisch means folk-like, meaning 'of the people/liked by the people'. The term predates, massively, any idea of race. In fact we have the same word in Swedish (folklig) and it has no politically incorrect air about it.
Ok but, letting a person speak isn't implicit approval of all their viewpoints. And if his talk is about tech, his political motivations aren't even relevant. I could see the motivation if like, he was going to bring in a wild group of radicals from his appearance or something and that would be disruptive, but as far as I know his viewpoints are pretty fringe.
"Letting a person speak" isn't the only impact of inviting that person to your event, particularly an event that facilitates social gatherings and an ongoing dialogue between its attendees. If we just wanted to exchange information as efficiently as possible, we wouldn't bother with the time and expense of in-person conferences. The event provides a social context, and that's why we put so much monetary and cultural value on attendance in comparison to, say, sitting at home and reading an academic paper or a blog post.
The guy obviously has some rather ugly views, but as far as I can tell he submitted a conference about his technology and unless there's some other evidence that he's not able to separate his politics from his work, why not assume good faith?
Maybe you know something I don't know, but what evidence is there to assume that he couldn't put his viewpoint aside and be a positive force for the social context?
It's really extrapolating hard to infer this from his writings. There's only one part in the Carlyle essay where he throws out a hypothesis about slavery, and nowhere does he imply that (1) this is a good thing or (2) that any persons are subhuman.
1. Unless you're doing an absolute ton of spending on your rewards credit card, any fees you pay on your credit card probably wipe out any cash you're getting back. If you're not paying fees yourself, merchants or other institutions may be subsidizing your rewards in ways that aren't sustainable. Many rewards programs have been slashed during the financial crisis of the last several years.
2. Cash-back rewards make your personal accounting more complicated. If you really want to set and meet financial goals, you need to be keeping close tabs on what you spend on what card, how much you're getting back in rewards, what fees you're paying, and where those reward dollars are going so that you're actually accumulating wealth (saving account, brokerage account, etc.). Our model combines an interest-bearing account with the ability to easily track your financial goals. Keeping it all in one place is, in our experience, way easier.
We're not crazy about the idea of rewards programs, but it's also not something we've completely ruled out. If we can find a way to do a rewards program that has clear incentives for our customers, merchants, and our partner institutions, we'll explore that.
1. I pay no fees on my credit card. My full balance is paid automatically and 1-5% is refunded (depending on where I spent the money). To put that in perspective, if I spend $50,000 I get back $500-2500, which is not an insignificant amount. You are absolutely correct that rewards are subsidized by merchant and banking fees. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but don't merchants have to pay fees when accepting Visa debit cards as well?
2. Cash-back rewards only make personal accounting more complicated if you calculate them on an ongoing basis and pay additional fees for the credit card. If you do neither of these you'll stay within your budget and be rewarded with a substantial bonus every month that you can then spend or invest.
With all that said, I agree that keeping it all in one place would be much easier and I would love to try Simple myself. I just can't imagine replacing my day-to-day purchases with a debit card, no matter how awesome the system that surrounds that card may be.
And if you're not into credit cards just by principle, there's always Perkstreet's debit card. As their tagline goes, "No fees, just perks." (Perks being gift cards or cash back.)
Some people are driven to change banks because of interest rates, but those people are not the majority. Most people change banks around major life events: moving, getting married, getting your first job, etc. Or, they change banks when they have an extremely negative experience with their current bank.
Either way, changing banks is a hassle, and we really have to make it easy and compelling. But interest/rewards aren't the only motivation, or even the primary motivation, for switching one's bank according to bank industry research.
> "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?