In that case, the reporting was (deliberately?) misleading. If he’s just another knucklehead presenting a panel at a conference with hundreds of other people - including presumably dozens of other presentations happening at the same time which people could go to instead of his - it doesn’t seem like it makes sense to make such a big deal out of this. Unless there’s any history of him actually harassing people at conferences or something like that.
More of his fan base, I see. Joined just to comment here?
Please come participate in some of the other threads! We have lots of conversations going on here.
How ageist.
If people want to know some about Moldbug’s Neo-Reactionary/Dark Enlightenment politics (aka Neo-Fascists):
It’s wonderful that you can put a nefarious spin on someone signing up to comment on a subject they know something about, but for that very reason you eliminate any appeal in participating elsewhere. Maybe you are so beset by sock puppets that to you, any recently created account is presumptively trolling - I have no idea, nor do I care. My identity is easily ascertained.
Anytime anyone with a rabid gamergate style fanbase shows up here, we get a plethora of new accounts that show up to comment only on that thread, often trolling, never to be seen again…
Besides, if you know “something about” this, you certainly didn’t show it in your only comment here. Please, enlighten us with your specialized wisdom on Moldbug and LambdaConf. The comment you left was simply complaining to another poster about not providing links.
Deliberately is certainly the favorite, especially if one catalogs the many other misrepresentations which have been casually bandied about. The conference isn’t of a size which would suggest “dozens” of other simultaneous presentations - few are - but others, yes.
As exciting as it sounds to go before the kangaroo court of a guy who can’t even find my comments, I’ll pass.
Tell the rest of your buddies to pile on. The more the merrier. We luvs the Dark Enlightenment!
But, you’re right, you did leave some substantive comments earlier. Your name just didn’t register when I saw them. I’ll give you that.
Yes, it does matter. In the spirit of Modest Proposal, a rocket fueled by liquified babies is more reprehensible than liquid oxygen, regardless of destination.
(Did I push that analogy too far?)
If your concern is the field, this is one of two things to consider. The other is just how discouraging his presence might be to other people. Because in reality most science and engineering are served far better by capable communities than lone geniuses, even if awards can only recognize the latter.
Celebrating a misogynist or racist for their brilliance, then, can be a short-term gain if it keeps minorities and women from your field. You know you don’t want to throw out your talent pool by insisting too much on ideological purity. Well, that goes for insisting on the narrow ideology that all applicants need to get past their feelings and not care if they are treated as people, too. Long-term advancement is served best by something between that takes tries to accommodate as many people as possible.
That means different cases should be evaluated differently; many fields have a nasty habit of erring to the one side, but ultimately it isn’t a given one way or the other. Should LambdaConf host Yarvin? I don’t know enough about him to say (eta: though am learning some from this thread), so can only hope the people who do make a good decision, taking into account both how he might contribute and how he might harm.
Moldbug has written extensively on how problem solving ability is racially determined, and the people who object to this are the real racists for saying that African-types should be held to white standards which are neigh impossible for them to meet.
So, uh, pretty racist.
Perhaps more to the point, he’s not just a racist. He’s a famous racist, who is famous for being racist and promoting a flavor of racism (biological determinism of technical competency) that is unfortunately pretty common in tech circles.
It’s easy to see resistance to his speaking as hyperbole, but it’s also about whether there are in fact any people who are too racist to be working in tech. I say speech has consequences; toss him out.
I’d say that depends on the liquified babies’ specific impulse.
Functional programmer sounds a bit too much like functional alcoholic to me.
Instead of AA meetings, they have
As a programmer, I love anonymous functions but god damn are they abused.
Functional programming is still largely mysterious black magic to me. I guess I am just too accustomed to the expressiveness of more traditional procedural languages.
I love it when functional and oop nerds gang up against procedurals. Dudes (it’s almost always dudes) there is an event loop somewhere, chill out. (Pure lambda languages still give me a headache though)
Are you into lambda.calculus?
I don’t believe calculus exists.
It doesn’t, but it does approach existence, which is good enough for most applications.