The staff of LambdaConf is in unanimous agreement to keep the pledge of conduct focused on behavior, and to refrain from excluding people for their belief systems.
The united States government is held by its constituents to keep that true for legal actions. Private conferences are not bound by the same law, tradition, or Creed. Yes, I will fight for a person to be legally bigoted, but I fucking won’t let them in my house. Or stand next to me.
(I don’t think I am arguing with you, simply stating my beliefs and positions)
I’m an ex-scientist. In science, the phenomena of “sure, he’s an unethical arsehole, but he produces a lot of research” is very common.
Unstated in that calculation is the stream of broken colleagues and students left in the wake of said arsehole. One dickish professor can annihilate the lifetime contributions of thirty years’ worth of grad students.
So the communities can grow thicker skin. Or give up said lone geniuses who can often do significant breakthroughs. (If you want a field where this is common, look at math. And modern technology sits squarely on it.)
A community that cannot cope with a controversial speaker here or there is too sensitive to minor disruptions/distractions to count as a capable one. Self-handicapping by excluding specialists just because of their politics or even just some quip is not a good strategy.
Similarly, self-handicapping by not entering a perspective field because somebody could hurt your sensitive feelings, regardless how much is this promoted by the safe-spaces crap that tends to spread around colleges, is also not a good strategy.
Note: by “controversial”, what we mean in this particular case is “openly calls for the enslavement, murder and rape of a large proportion of the other conference attendees”.
Yeah, we aren’t arguing about hurt feelings. It’s more along the lines of Should We Insta Sun a group of people. I do believe there is an ethical line before you get to that line of questioning, as put more eloquently than me by Swift.
According to an article about a similar brouhaha last year, where the speaker was not allowed to talk, his actual writing is, according to a writer who actually read it, much less menacing.
This and other Yarvin pieces certainly reveal him to be a bigot at the very least, but it’s a major reach to call them hate speech, since they’re about as intimidating as skim milk. Calling it such insults those who suffer under the very real and violent hate speech of actual hate groups.
But instead what happens is that they lose a great deal of potential talent, and as people who pay attention to STEM fields have found, the field loses out because of it. Because of course it doesn’t amount to just allowing a controversial figure here or there but is part of a pervasive problem with how women and minorities are treated.
People who care about progress do much better to pay attention to that problem, than to coddle the feelings of a few delicate geniuses who can’t handle respecting their colleagues. You could ask them to suck it up too, you know, much more reasonably.
The lone inventor is usually a myth. I mean, sure, a great deal of underpinnings are often credited to a single genius, and back when there was less community such people were often an important part of them. But even then they were often just the first to crystallize what many others were gathering, and now far more important things are really the result of having many researchers work away at a problem.
Again, those who care about the progress of a field do well to worry more about building the community and institutions that produce geniuses. Excluding a few of the established ones may be a short-term loss, but if they’re actually so toxic they keep other people away it is an investment. If you put your feelings for them aside, science is bigger than its heroes.
I have the right to not let anyone, for any reason talk to me. Logic and engineering go both ways, iptables ain’t accepting everything by default for a reason. And we bounds check our functions. And we check for off by ones.
All because both humans and our environment are dicks. But we don’t have to accommodate heap sprays or exception handling attacks, or dicks.
