lambdaconf

[vlion]

Was more or less planning on going to Lambdaconf this year. Lots of folks at the company recommend it.

Come this last week, I find out Moldbug was going per Degoes' blog post. whatevs. But it looks like the angry Social Justics Twitter Mob is working on revoking sponsorship of Lambdaconf. I wonder if it will happen.

It seems as if my beloved hacker community is now policing thinking. Being on the conservative side of things appears to be unacceptable (B. Eich @ Mozilla), and whatever lunacies Moldbug came up with are apparently unacceptable. Whatever happened to freedom to be weird, to believe odd things? There used to be all sort of fun and strange eccentricities. Selecting for high variance of ideas... And, worse, whatever happened to actual debate of ideas you disagreed with? That's gone the way of the dino, I guess.


(side note: long story over the past 18 months about uncomfortable ideas in universities being banned. Stupid. Break the bad ideas, don't avoid them).

There's a tradition in the Western Enlightenment about allowing debate of ideas: angry loud vehement debate of ideas; quiet long rationalization of ideas; sniping back and forth of ideas. This has fuelled the best of Western traditions. Idealogical purity across a society was a feature of tyrants; the Communists are the most present heirs of the approach; others have existed. Ideological purity in the software world will not be a pleasant place.

this story won't end well.

(Personal side note: I am of a faith tradition (Radical Reformation) which was persecuted brutally for thinking different. It is terribly straightforward for me to connect the current ideas over to that, even if they aren't being transferred to that right now. It's incredibly important we can yell at each other, then shake hands and not destroy each other's lives over our disagreements).


In any case: I do not support this kind of behaviour. If you want my (rather non-influential) support for this, you don't have it. If you want to argue with me: go for it.

Comments

[mathemagicalschema]

as someone who is pretty into social justice as a concept, and as someone who has been working within/around activist communities of various stripes for several years now, the loud bits of the current social justice movement scare the shit out of me.

I think the present-day social justice movement does a pretty good job at pointing out problems that need fixing. Its attempts to shamble toward solutions, though, are horrific. And I think can basically be explained when you consider how disempowered and vulnerable the people imagining the solutions feel, and sometimes, are. Teenagers with shitty parents are the heart and soul of the movement, which explains a hell of a lot if you take some time to think about it.

[vlion]

> I think the present-day social justice movement does a pretty good job at pointing out problems that need fixing.

I agree here! Too much stuff is heinously broken, and breaking harder. And the very loud people who are usually against social justice are often very easy to be very angry about.

I'm compiling a list here of the Standard Twitter Social Justice people re their Lambdaconf sayings, and it really reads like a talking list of "let's start making certain kind of thought criminal". That's all well and good and so forth when you have Obviously Bad people. But once you've set that cat of thoughtcrime out..., when there's PRECEDENT for thoughtcrime, now it's subject to ABUSE, and bad actors, and... well.... the Soviets tried that?

Certain of our beliefs would have gotten us in SERIOUS trouble for advocating them 300 years ago. Social pariahs, outcasts, no job, maybe criminal charges ( for me: criminal charges in most of Europe, as someone in the radical reformation faith tradition ). But today: these are NORMAL. Or OKAY. What kind of thing could we shutting down TODAY that will be JUST AS VALUABLE in 300 years?

and I'm super super upset about this, because, well, this isn't a better world that I see folks arguing toward. It's a worse world, where "oppression olympics" starts to have significant consequences outside of the local activist group.

Parenthetical aside:

when I was a teenager, I loved being a username on the internet, talking with other usernames. our identity was our nerdiness. sex, gender, what you did to who when where and how really wasn't actually interesting to me, if it didn't involve a computer or my fandoms. or if you weren't being hurt and needed someone to talk to. kind of limited, I admit. I had caught a meme-virus I guess, a virus that got reflected in the "Cyberia" book by Rushkoff... totes worth reading btw... identity was mutable, was shiftable, was mediated by the computer which you controlled. You had arguments, but they weren't the deep level of ugly we see on twitter. (BTW: Gamergate? I think there were some decent thoughts from the 'Gators - I think I saw one or two glimpses, but it was buried so deep under the foaming rage and vileness... so ugly. )

I don't know. But I'm scared for the intellectual functioning of *my* society, the hacker one. It's possible a lot of the energy is coming out of teenagers, but a lot of the significant voices are people very much in the professional segment of their lives: the late 20s to 40s set. Most? of them seem to be, broadly, in agreement with the hard(er) left, from what I can recall over time. Which is also concerning, because I wish the hard left would move on from Soviet-era solutions (The group of students at WWU recently suggested, in effect, having a Kommissar watching speech). The anarchists are still mining Bakunin for ideas, for crying out loud (I was looking up anarchist child raising ideas). He's dead, Jim! Didn't the 70s produce any thinkers that are usable today? Ahem. Back to the professionals. It's pretty clear to me that the Twitter hate mob has pretty much driven the people who are opposed to doing bad things in the name of Social Justice underground on the Twitters. AFAIK, only this particular group of autistic lesbian types seems to be both intelligent and vocal about what's going on (I'm *sure* there are jackass sealions involved. So many jackasses).

Of *course*, with the Trumpism thing going on, the natural reaction of humans is to cringe and move away from anything that smells Trumpy... so it pushes a lot of energy towards the leftierish solutions in general. If the current solution is "ban badthought", then.... uhh... we gonna have a bad time in 5 years.

[tcpip]

As a self-identified Social Justice WarriorWizard, I have to say that the "no platform" types - once one gets past their bluster - are actually a little scared of having their ideas challenged and being incorrect.

[vlion]

'No platform'? Sorry, who are you referencing? My mind is Swiss cheese after a day in the sun.

[tcpip]

'No Platform' is a political strategy designed to exclude people of a contrary ideology. Easy to invoke when most people oppose the ideology in question (e.g., Nazism), but the principle has no boundaries - and of course the situation can be reversed.