This started with me reading via Vox a post by ESR on Lambda. Lambda is a conference on functional programming. Which I know nothing about. What I do know is that Curtis, who used to be Moldbug (but I think he got bored with political nerds) wrote Urbit, and was invited to give a paper.

And that is something I know about. I have been on too many conference committees, and read too many abstracts. The bar is not that high to present: be somewhat original and coherent. And the first thing you do is remove the name and place from the abstract, and get someone to read them “blind”. Because Harvard and Otago both have status.

And Lamdaconf did this. Cool. And when the political nerds outed that Moldbug was going to give a technical report, then the political nerds decided to no platform him. But… Popehat and 451.org decided to fund it anyway…. and won.

Which is summarized in a comment from ESR’s place, which will serve as the remainder of the introduction.

While it’s fun to abuse the moron(s?), I think there may be value in trying to set out a longer view of what’s going on and why. Not everyone can be expected to be extensively familiar with history, the LambdaConf squabble, and/or our host, after all.

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One, wrt who did what why, I would identify several closely related stages and aspects here.

The first is LambdaConf’s blind review of Yarvin’s submission; this I would say is a matter of merit. They stripped away information about the speaker when deciding whether to accept, preventing personal friendship, animosity, or bigotry from influencing their decision.

Free expression arguably came in at the stage where a bunch of communists, SJWs, and their fellow travelers demanded that Yarvin be excluded, demands which were usually accompanied by flinging a lot of insults tangentially related to what he’d written elsewhere under the handle Moldbug. (Particularly hilarious and stupid were the variations on ‘white supremacist’ and ‘Nazi’: Moldbug is a Jew who praises Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong.) This sort of shitflinging attempt to get a speaker removed because he allegedly said wicked things elsewhere is opposed to free expression: it implies that you can’t talk about programming if you have talked about reactionary politics. It is further and more dangerously opposed to free expression when seen in context of recent scalps such as Brendan Eich, which suggests there is a wider stream of opinion that you should lose your livelihood if you expressed support for the former party line and haven’t loudly and vehemently enough recanted and wavered with the party.

Inclusion was why LambdaConf told the above lot to bugger off. I won’t repeat here what they said at great length elsewhere.

Safety needs a disambiguation thanks to word-butchers fighting with rhetorical sleight of hand. One is what I will unashamedly call safety proper, which is where LambdaConf asks Moldbug if he will refrain from violence, and says they’ll exclude people with a history of violence or of breaking codes of conduct. The other is safety of feelings, which certain dishonest cry-bullies use as a way of suppressing dissent by saying that they don’t feel safe around persons of contrary opinion, therefore please exclude those persons.

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Two, the status of various communists as being communists is relevant because they started that aspect of the fight: among the arguments given for removing Yarvin from LambdaConf in specific and technical conferences in general were several variations on “He’s affiliated with/argues for/defends horrible, terrible, evil ideologies that murdered, enslaved and oppressed people!” (Shorter version: “He’s a fascist!”) But these are grounds for removing every communist too; and arguably removing the communists first because of communism’s bloodier history and the communists’ closer ties to specific bloody implementations, where Moldbug professes no loyalty to any existing ideological structure and has several times proposed new names (such as neocameralism) for the thing he’s building. However, the communists seem somewhat less than willing to have themselves excluded from technical conferences on these grounds, and their fellow-travelers similarly unwilling to disassociate.

Summarised in logical form: The SJWs asserted X. X implies Y. The SJWs deny Y. This is a contradiction exposed by raising the matter of communism.

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Three, on communism being bad and arguments thereto. “Solzhenitsyn” is a metonym much like one says “Hollywood” for the American film industry. It denotes in part Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, a book on the gulags (prison-cum-slave-labor-cum-concentration-camps) of the totalitarian Soviet Union and the conditions therein; and denotes in part (information about) the gulags themselves. Over 10 million people passed through these, with very high mortality rates due to the gulag conditions being about as terrible as one might expect when imagining forced labor in Siberia. At least 1 million died there. The exact numbers are unknown and very hard to know, because, well, care for prisoners was in about as short supply as one might expect from the sort of people who will work prisoners to death in Siberia. Prisoners on the brink of death might frequently be given “amnesty” and set free (i.e. released into the Siberian wilderness while sick and malnourished) to fudge the statistics on prisoner death rate. I have seen estimates of 20 million people passing through the camps of which about half died and half escaped, but I think the minimal confirmed figures are enough to put this among the worst things in the world.

That’s still not counting the millions of other deaths from the Soviet Union outside of the gulag, or the millions of other deaths from communist regimes outside of the Soviet Union.

While American does not have a month dedicated to remembering the abuses of communism the way it has a month dedicated to remembering the abuses of American slavery, the former are nonetheless monstrous enough to be at least comparable with the latter and well documented enough that you can expect to have abuse heaped on you if you try to brush them off.

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Four, it is absolutely absurd to assert that ESR is a SJW or a warrior for the establishment, because ESR is an anarchist-libertarian-ish type, a pagan, a splitter, a Heinleinian, otherwise a fringe and contrarian sort of person in general, and has written so much anti-establishment material that it goes beyond mere ignorance and into knee-jerk “disagreement is fascist!” to assert such a thing.

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Five, the argumentum ad hominem fallacy consists in attempting to reason from an insult to a conclusion that does not follow – for example, “You’re an asshat, therefore you are wrong.” There is no such fallacy in saying “You’re a mendacious turd, and you are wrong.” Fallacies are a bestiary of flaws in reasoning, not in conduct – if your interlocutor is telling you to take a long walk off a short pier, the correct response is not to cry fallacy, but to ask (yourself or your interlocutor) what you might have done to get such abuse.

But why does Curtis do this? Well, he’s bright, and not that interested in the rituals and social observations. He probably can tolerate the neuro-diverse. Which brings me to the main part of this. The social justice wounded rely on social shaming and shunning. Which do not compute above a certain level of talent.

Curtis got bored with political theory. And the no platforming is stupid. So it was subverted. Monkey ritual not compute: monkey ritual ignored because the effort to accede to it is greater than just funding the conf and watching the political nerds rage.

ESR is more talented than I am. But I will note this: most of the very bright people I know have developed social skills that enable others to contribute. Because it is not that hard to do so, given a little goodwill.

I am not an autist, and to my knowledge have no autistic relatives. I was thought to be a child prodigy with exceptional mathematical gifts; in 1975 I was the first high-school student in the institution’s memory to present original research at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Unusually large working memory, check. I’m pretty sure the authors would consider me a genius, unless they know a lot of people who have been all of: A-list software architects, New York Times bestselling authors also nominated for a Campbell Award, musicians good enough to do session work on two albums, world-championship-level players of strategy games, speakers who’ve drawn packed crowds on six continents, martial-arts instructors, sought-after advisors to investment bankers, and founders of successful reform movements that arguably changed history.

I also have the advantage that my peer network has been stiff with geniuses for forty years. I’ve logged a lot of time interacting with both autistic and non-autistic geniuses, and I’m anthropologically observant. So hear this:

Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: not giving a shit about monkey social rituals.

Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and status-maintainance activity. They have great difficulty sustaining interest in anything that won’t yield a near-immediate social reward. By an autist’s standards (or mine) they’re almost always running in a hamster wheel as fast as they can, not getting anywhere.

The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare for anything else. Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.

Non-autists have it tougher. To do the genius thing, they have to be either so bright that they can do the monkey status grind with a tiny fraction of their cognitive capability, or train themselves into indifference so they basically don’t care if they lose the neurotypical social game.

Once you realize this it’s easy to understand why the incidence of socially-inept nerdiness doesn’t peak at the extreme high end of the IQ bell curve, but rather in the gifted-to-low-end-genius region closer to the median. I had my nose memorably rubbed in this one time when I was a guest speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afternoon tea was not a nerdfest; it was a roomful of people who are good at the social game because they are good at just about anything they choose to pay attention to and the monkey status grind just isn’t very difficult. Not compared to, say, solving tensor equations.

The basic insight here is not original to me. The term “neurotypical” was actually coined by a very bright autist who then proceeded to write a hilarious fake DSM entry on how wacky and self-defeating “normal” cognitive function looks from his point of view. I looked at his site years ago, saw truth, and have been collecting related observations ever since.

Social pressure does not work on people who can switch these circuits off. It matters not if they are the very bright, or fundamentalists, or the crunchy.

Demanding that we are nice by your terms is something that we will allow if you leave us alone. That works most of the time: in a usual society Curtis would do his presentation and Urbit would sink or swim. But these are not usual times. We are supposed to converge. We are supposed to think the same.

And that will not work. For this elite are in error. Their tools won’t work on those who value them not: be they software architects, the alt right, the trad cons or the muj. Hashtags are but noise.

But expect that these tactics will increase as they fail.

One battle is not this war.

The campaign is already fully funded. But I thought some of you in the tech world might like to know about it, and be a part of it. There are many ways to help fund the alt-right’s war against the SJWs, and helping those who are victims of their successful attacks is an important defensive strategy, as it will embolden those who are standing up to them.

And good for LambdaConf for standing by its speakers rather than caving to the SJW-converged sponsors. This is how cultural wars are won, one hard-earned victory after another.

The Holiness Spiral is starting to get in the way of the work of the Sons of Martha. If it continues, the nuts will loosen, and the essential technologies of this time, from railways to software, will weaken.

We will either start filtering these people out, or find ourselves in a post civilization. For that there is an old name. Barbarism.