So here's a sort of goofy thing.

A week or two after Len died, I forget exactly, all of a sudden one day emails addressed to him started showing up in my inbox, most of them listservs and announcements and things like that. It was a bit jarring and quite surreal; then again, basically everything about that time had a "you are living in a Jeunet and Caro film" feel to it, or at least that's the cinematography everything from around that time has when I play it back in my head, the point-of-view floating erratically like a balloon drifting through the streets. (This was also around the time when I had someone accompanying me every time I left the house because I was often too distracted to avoid walking into traffic. Just to give you some context.)

Of course I figured out pretty quickly what had happened, and an email in the mix from one of his colleagues at Leuven confirmed it: the department was removing his account from their servers, and had added an alias from his email address to mine. (They'd also backed up his mail spool and home directory on DVD and it was waiting for me at my convenience. Belgians are polite.) So, for better or for worse, my dead husband and I were now sharing an inbox.

I suppose some people, maybe even a lot of people, would be done with that email address at that point. I was the exact opposite. For days, I read his email -- every single one that came through my inbox. Even the duplicates from mailing lists we were both on; those I tried to read through his eyes, tried to imagine the conversation we might have had about each one. I smoked cigarettes in bed, trying to call up discussions about fountain pens and ink chemistry while we chain-smoked by the swing-open window in our flat in Leuven, and pored over advertising e-mails from fountain pen vendors. I read conference announcements. I read spam conference announcements. I read LinkedIn updates. It was routine, mechanical -- no judgment to apply, just read it, read it all.

Len's favourite book was A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I forget who we had do this at the funeral, but somebody read this quote from it¹ aloud:

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

Some of the mail did in fact stop coming. Something is apparently not quite right with the alias configuration, in such a fashion that he's been automatically unsubscribed from most (if not all) of the Mailman lists he was on, because too many bounce notifications happened and I didn't have the time or energy to keep up with reactivating subscriptions for mailing lists I was already subscribed to myself. The DIYbio mailing list is still going strong, though, as are the ACM table-of-contents announcements -- he was on a lot of journal notification lists. I don't read the DIYbio duplicates anymore, though I'm not going to take him off the list; I feel there's something meaningless but honorable about Google faithfully dispatching an extra copy of each message in his name, into perpetuity, like a priest saying Masses for the soul of someone who donated to their church², except the priest has been replaced by a very small shell script. I kept reading the ToCs for a while; lately I have been letting them pile up, perhaps in frustration with the ACM and their obnoxious paywall policies, but I will probably leave him subscribed in case they do get around to going open access. Actually making the effort to unsubscribe him from anything involves confronting a wall of inertia that I still don't feel up to dealing with, coming up two years on; it's easier to delete the obvious spam, mark as read the things I pretend I'll go back and read someday but am really just consigning to a box in the virtual garage (though, granted, a box I can grep), whittle the flow of data down to a manageable trickle.

The end result of this is a stream of his professional life, as it has continued in his absence. Most of it is reports from various paper- and slide-tracking services about how often his papers are being read, plus bursts of LinkedIn endorsements and the occasional connection request (of which, at this point, I expect most are spam). The endorsements were weird at first, but over time I decided that if people wanted to use that as a way to say "Yes, Len was good at that," there wasn't anything wrong with that. ("The street finds its uses for things; uses the makers never intended.") So the net effect is, oddly enough, kind of comforting. His work lives on. Our work continues.

Things change. Ain't nothing like it once was; not a goddamned thing.


¹He'd given me a copy of the book our first Christmas together, and I'd read it all the way through once. I knew I wanted something from it read at the funeral, but wasn't sure what. That passage is in the first chapter; I re-read the entire book in the couple of days between getting back to Belgium and the morning of the funeral. I don't know why I'm bringing this up, it just seemed relevant.

²He was a lapsed Catholic; I think he would have appreciated that simile.

I've made my own contributions to the #IAskedPolitely discussion, which probably got lost in the shuffle. But those are my unusual stories. Here are twothree real-life stories of what conflict resolution, in those kinds of scenarios, usually looks like for me.

---

I'm among a small group of hacker friends, and the subject of underrepresentation of women as conference speakers comes up. Someone suggests we list names. Len mentions a transwoman we know.

"Does $NAME really count?" someone asks.

"Yes, she counts," I say.

"Okay, she counts," the person agrees.

---

It's about 4am at a bar. I've been deep in conversation with a male friend for several hours, and we're both very intoxicated. We're leaned in close to hear each other over the music. "I'd really like to kiss you," he says.

"Actually I think that would be a terrible idea," I blurt out.

"Okay," my friend says, and we go back to whatever it was we were talking about.

Some months later we run into each other in the same bar. I try to apologise for being so abrupt that night. "Don't you see?" he says. "All I wanted from you was honesty, and you gave that to me. I couldn't be happier."

---

Edit: This one requires a little background. Let me introduce you to my "friend" SID. We've been living together for years, and it's why you'll never see me in a car with the window rolled down: the physical sensation of wind drives me to distraction.

So it's a windy morning in Hamburg, and the line to pick up wristbands for 29c3 wraps around the conference center. thequux and I are bundled up tightly, and he tries to provide a windbreak as best he can, but I have six inches on him and there's only so much he can do. After half an hour in line, we enter the vestibule and the immediate stimulus as gone, but my nerves are still ringing like a five-alarm fire. "You drive," I tell him, and he handles all the complicated interacting-with-humans issues involved in getting our wristbands. The Angels have no problem with this.

A few minutes later, we are in the conference and running into friends we haven't seen in months. "No hugs right now!" I say over and over. People are surprised, but understanding. "Would a beer help?" suggests someone with my friend Jayson. "Depressants, great idea," I say, and we go to the bar. One beer and half an hour later there is still some residual jangliness, but physical contact is no longer startling or painful.

---

This is the kind of interaction I'm used to in the hacker scene. It's why I feel comfortable there.

What is it that's so different for me?

Skip this post if you're sick of hearing about Donglegate.

We'll start with a little history. You might have noticed, in the KYM synopsis, a reference to the PyCon Code of Conduct, a document largely derived from boilerplate language originally advanced, systematically, by the Ada Initiative in August 2012. The PyCon code asserts that "all delegates/attendees, speakers, exhibitors, organizers and volunteers at any PyCon event are required to conform to" it, and identifies organisers as the enforcing authority. I'm pretty comfortable with calling that a social contract, voluntarily assented to by the actions of registering for the conference and accepting a badge. Furthermore, during the conference, wearing one's badge serves as an ongoing signifier of one's participation in this social contract. (More on that in a little bit.)

How about terminating the contract? Ejection without refund is a penalty explicitly stated in the PyCon code, so there's one condition under which the contract may be terminated; to the extent that badges serve as a form of access control¹, requiring attendees ejected under the code to surrender their badges signifies that their participation in the social contract has been terminated. Presumably, then, an attendee/speaker/exhibitor/volunteer/organiser could also, having voluntarily assented to the contract by registering, also voluntarily withdraw from the contract (symbolically, by handing their badge back to the organisers and leaving).

Keep that last part in mind; it has knock-on effects.

I've gotten into a few discussions on Twitter, which I'll just summarise here but can maybe summarize in a Storify or something if sufficiently incentivised to do so, about the PyCon organisers' efforts to revise the language of the code in the wake of Donglegate. As this year's chair Jesse Noller comments in that thread, "Explicit is better than implicit" -- quoting from the Zen of Python, which (like so many things) probably started as a ha-ha-only-serious bit of humour but has come to be embraced as a sort of normative philosophy for building both Python the language and Python the community. As another commenter in the same thread predicted even earlier, though, "it's inevitably going to be looked on as a gagging provision" -- even though, as Jesse then points out, staff are attempting to clarify the language to better express their already existing, and unchanged by this incident, perspective on the aggregate damage that the "name and shame first" approach readily leads to.

Presumably, opponents of policy change are disappointed to see that PyCon does not take their side in encouraging the name-and-shame-first strategy. But I think it is disingenuous of them to portray the change as a gagging provision. As of the current revision, the policy makes the following changes related to place, time, and manner of speech about violations of the code:

• "PyCon staff requests that they be your first resource when reporting a PyCon-related incident, so that they may enforce the Code of Conduct and take quick action toward a resolution."
• "Please do not disclose public information about the incident until the staff have had sufficient time in which to address the situation."

Unlike much of the other language in the code ("Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon."), these items are phrased as requests, not requirements. Maybe putting it in RFC-speak will make it a little clearer:

• You MUST be kind to others.
• You MUST NOT insult or put down other attendees.
• PyCon staff SHOULD be your first resource when reporting a PyCon-related incident.
• You SHOULD NOT disclose public information about the incident until the staff have had sufficient time in which to address the situation.

And, indeed, when we look at the IETF's definitions of these four terms:

1. MUST This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the
definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.

2. MUST NOT This phrase, or the phrase "SHALL NOT", mean that the
definition is an absolute prohibition of the specification.

3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

4. SHOULD NOT This phrase, or the phrase "NOT RECOMMENDED" mean that
there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances when the
particular behavior is acceptable or even useful, but the full
implications should be understood and the case carefully weighed
before implementing any behavior described with this label.

we see that these terms in fact capture Jesse's concerns. There are very valid reasons to take an issue public, but doing so carries with it certain risks, regardless of the validity of one's actions. I think it's reasonable on the part of PyCon to express an organisational opinion on this matter, and given that their opinion as expressed is 1) only a recommendation, and 2) even if followed, delays public disclosure by a matter of hours, I don't find the recommendation particularly chilling with respect to speech in general. I would attend a conference with such a policy; I already live in a country² that asserts exclusive right to all executive and judicial power, so spending some time in an environment where the agreed-upon authority has put some thought into which conditions of its social contract are optional and which ones aren't is really kind of refreshing.

And now we get back to the part from earlier about terminating contracts: if I go to a conference with a code of conduct, even one with a straight-up gag rule (which, again, I don't think PyCon's is), some code of conduct violation happens, and I'm unhappy with both the resolution and my ability to talk about it under the terms of the social contract, I can withdraw from the social contract. See, organisations can breach terms of contract too. Organisations that breach their contractual obligations sufficiently, or are negligent, can be held liable for this in civil court. Liability and harm are of course closely interrelated; a con staff that, for instance, (warning: extreme example) concealed evidence of a rape and discouraged the victim from contacting police has obviously gone well beyond breach of contract into becoming accomplices to felony conduct. (In a case that extreme, the last thing the victim should have to think about is any perceived sense of obligation to honour a social contract that the organisation long since put into a crosscut shredder and pissed on.)

Had Adria Richards gone to the PyCon staff and been dissatisfied with the outcome, it's questionable whether she would have been able to, say, recoup the cost of admission in a civil breach of contract suit. I'm not sure whether the PyCon code is, even now, worded well enough to hold much water in a civil court; I don't get the impression the Ada Initiative consulted a lawyer when they developed it, though if someone has better information on that, I'll correct that in-place.

But my point is, organisations also have incentives, long established in the civil court system, to hold up their ends of the bargains they've made. A lot of the people I've talked with have raised the question, "Why should we necessarily trust that staff will do a good job of resolving the issue?" And this is the part where I start tearing my hair out -- because the loudest voices shouting this demand are the same ones who demanded that codes of conduct be instituted in the first place. Why even bother asking an organisation to modify its policies on your behalf if you don't trust the organisation enough to use the reporting channels and protocols it established because you asked for them? Isn't that a signaling of trust, of good faith, on the part of the conference organisers that these channels will be used?

These are questions I don't get a lot of answers to on Twitter.

¹I didn't have a ticket to PyCon, but had no problem wandering around the public areas, the expo, and the sprints (which are all open to the public). I didn't bother trying to wander into any talks, though I don't think I would have been stopped. Other conferences, e.g. Black Hat, have a strong public/private space distinction (anyone can walk into the Expo, but you will get kicked out if you try to get into talks without a badge); others are tighter still (it's easy to get a free badge to get into the RSA Expo, but you're not even getting into that without one). Tl;dr (too late): "are badges access control" is a question with a different answer for each conference, and "access control to what?" is an important question for each conference to ask when deciding their overall answer. Proceed with context. Infinity welcomes careful drivers.

²Which country? All of them!

Well, that was the longest radio silence we've had in a while.

I don't know if this is really even a platform anymore, but there are some things I've been meaning to write, and I guess for now this is as good a place as any.

A lot's changed. Len killed himself, and deleted his LJ before he did it, so I can't even refer to him like I used to. Eventually this place may just still feel too alien; I guess we'll see.

I'm working in natural language processing again, which is sooner than I was planning on, but I'm enjoying it -- and indirectly working with martian_bob again, because life's cool like that.

Things change. Ain't nothin' like it once was; not a goddamn thing.

Thank you for the lovely birthday wishes yesterday, everyone! It cracks me up that most of them showed up on Facebook, since that's the social networking service I use the least, but really I'm quite delighted by all the greetings and nifty links people sent.

I thought pretty seriously about going up to Holland yesterday, since I share a birthday with the former Queen Juliana and thus it is a national holiday. However, if I had decided to stay late into the night it would have been hard to find a hotel, so I spent the day in Leuven instead. I picked up some new SD cards for my phone and some other gadgets, and checked out some handheld video cameras, since I have a couple of video projects in mind and the camera on my phone is not that great. After that, I went to the Oude Markt, where I ran into a bunch of friends and enjoyed lots and lots of free beer. Around 11 it was getting kind of chilly, though, so I went home, had some food, and promptly zonked out.

Now I am awake, with no hangover even, and I have a hankering for ribs, so D and I are going to go find some. Mmm, ribs.

Tomorrow I fly to Orlando for a week of meetings for work. Who all lives in Florida these days? I have no sense of FL geography and will not have a car, but if anyone's up for hangouts, let's figure something out.

OK, ribs now!

This probably makes more sense if you've already seen the previous Keynes/Hayek Rap Battle. Go check it out, I'll wait.

Now, please enjoy the lyrical stylings of Billy Scafuri and Adam Lustick, featuring Richard J. Murphy:



Obviously I am backing Team Spontaneous Order; Freddie wuz robbed! I'm not sure how well these videos actually communicate the dispute between top-down Keynesian economics and bottom-up Austrian economics versus how much ends up being clever in-jokes for econ nerds, but it is worth pointing out that the EconStories team, who produced both rap battles, also have a series of videos that present both philosophies with more detail and less music. Alas, each of these has gotten at most a tenth one lousy percent of the views of "Fear the Boom and Bust". Do please go show them some love -- I think you'll find their work both entertaining and informative.

After that last post, some of you may be thinking "But, Meredith, I don't think I've ever heard you talk about transhumanism before outside of the context of Vernor Vinge's novels. Are you an extropian, too? What's up with this futurism stuff?"

I used to have a lot of extropians in my social circle, and through conversations with them I arrived at a position that I jokingly referred to as "weak anthropic extropianism". Simply put, it is my opinion that while the chances of my surviving to an advanced age are quite high, and our understanding of biology, genetics and aging is advancing so fast that younger generations -- possibly even people who are alive now -- may in fact be able to extend their lives indefinitely, the question of whether I as an almost-34-year-old Western woman will have that option is already settled. Either I was born late enough to take advantage of the fruits of research into Not Dying, or I will die before this option becomes available to me. Realistically, it's probably the latter, and so I live every day with a subtle awareness of my own mortality. It's an interesting motivator: some day, you will die, and there's a lot you want to accomplish before that happens, so hop to it! Thinking about time and effort as finite resources also helps me to recognise sunk-cost fallacies, which is a nice cognitive benefit. All in all, it may not be optimistic, but at least it's adaptive.

Support for the weak anthropic extropian position comes from a variety of directions. These graphs of how cancer survival rates have improved over a period of 43 years show how dramatically and consistently the evidence-based approach with which we investigate disease has produced results in the form of living, cancer-free human beings. "Personalised medicine" is starting to become a reality; already, millions of patients are treated for rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn's disease with monoclonal antibodies, designed to inhibit an immune-system protein which their bodies have problems with. Monoclonal vaccines and other anti-infectives -- proteins tailored to knock out specific viruses -- are on the market already. Customised therapies are a pretty short bridge from there. It'll start with some weird fucking disease, probably an autoimmune disorder because that's where the Westerners are when you draw your map by morbidities, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if AIDS research heads in the direction of tailoring different therapies to different strains of the virus -- and then, armed with the discoveries in genetics (and more importantly, genetic engineering) from that endeavour, tailoring them to patients as well.

Put another way, I think we're going to find out whether it's possible for there to be a non-physically-aging Homo sapiens pretty soon now, whatever the answer actually ends up being.

But, you know, an awful lot of alchemists probably said "I think we're going to find out whether it's possible to transmute lead into gold pretty soon now, whatever the answer actually ends up being" not too long before the discipline of alchemy underwent a phase transition into the discipline of chemistry (with significant help, I might add, from the disciplines of brewing and, I shit you not, accounting. The taxation of alcohol plays an enormous role in the history of chemical engineering.) The good parts of alchemy (a lot of the equipment that was developed, and a lot of practical knowledge about things like melting and boiling points, as well as ways of keeping records of experimentation) provided a springboard for the development of a far more accurate and predictive model of the properties of natural (and, later, unnatural) substances. So even if the answer really is "no, aging is inescapable," we're going to learn -- have already learned -- a hell of a lot about how the human body works, and how it can break, and how to fix it when it breaks, and that's the kind of knowledge that can be employed to help make sure that billions of mortal human beings experience a healthier and more enjoyable ephemeral, all-too-short existence.

This position is inherently futurist, though not as dramatically so as strains of futurism that focus on climactic achievements of great technological depth. An imagined future where some people never age is the stuff of science fiction; same for one where brain-computer interfaces exist. The goals that I as a weak anthropic futurist am interested in accomplishing are ones of great scope. How can we wipe out nutrient deficiency diseases in the developing world (and among the poor in the developed world)? How can we dramatically reduce the attack surfaces of network protocols? These are things that affect people right now, and they're problems I happen to be interested in solving and think I stand a reasonably good chance at being able to affect in a positive way. So that's why I don't make an effort to hang out with the H+ crowd. I think they're great folks, I drink beer with them at conferences, I love what they're doing, I'm just working on different stuff. Your brain-computer interface is going to need protocol implementations that don't have parser vulnerabilities, for crying out loud, so Imma make sure you guys have the tools to do that, particularly since it helps out the Internet we already have.

Human health (and network health) are big problems. Billions of people, billions of computers. And one thing we've learned in the last several decades is that large-scale systems are a field of study in themselves. Sometimes people try to build predictive models of large-scale systems, and usually, when they fuck it up amazingly, everyone knows that something got amazingly fucked up (cf. the failure of predictive models that led directly to the credit crisis) even if they don't know which model failed. I don't think we really notice when predictive models -- like the one at the power plant that feeds your city, which predicts how much demand to expect and takes generating capacity on- and off-line to avoid waste or damage -- succeed. Large-scale engineering works; the very existence of the Internet provides all kind of fascinating case studies. I think we will derive tremendous increases of human health and happiness from better understanding of how these sorts of systems do -- or don't -- expand or contract, thrive or perish, succeed or fail as platforms for whatever we try to launch from them. Evgeny Morozov, for instance, levies a lot of criticism at "techno-utopians" who advocate spreading freedom through spreading free speech online, and Malcolm Gladwell derides "Facebook activists"; both are often perceived as gadflies, but they provide a vital service, looking for feedback that shows whether a certain large-scale behaviour produces a desired outcome or not. (Gladwell less so than Morozov, as Gladwell's target is really a strawman.) So I suppose you could say that if I'm a futurist, then my futurism is directed toward problems of scale with regard to health and information processing.

Or I could just say "yeah, I think it'd be really awesome if everyone never got sick and always had safe, reliable ways to communicate and access information from anywhere in the world, and I think we can achieve these things, so let's hurry up and make it happen already!" That probably sounds more mainstream-futurist.

Matt Bell remarks about the blind spot that many futurists exhibit with respect to the organisational and effort-leveraging capabilities of the religious, whom those futurists regard as "too dumb or narrow-minded to understand futurist concepts like the Singularity."

I don't think this class of blind spot is necessarily limited to futurists; many people who are experts in some area develop the belief that everyone else is too dumb or narrow-minded to understand their area of expertise. Lawyers, for instance, or accountants, or auto mechanics, or really anyone whose income relies on maintaining and being able to use a specialised body of knowledge.

When I reflect on this, I find that I have the impression that the people who are most prone to this belief are self-taught or mostly so. This surprises me, because I'd expect autodidacts to be more appreciative of people's ability to learn outside of an established pedagogical system!

But assuming that my impression is correct, which it may very well not be, I can see a few reasons why it might be the case. One is that autodidactic learning is highly specialised to the learner, and the learning methods that work for person X might not work as well for person Y. But if X's only experience with learning a field or skill is idiosyncratic(1), X may have a difficult time communicating to Y about how to learn in this area. "It worked for me! If it doesn't work for you then I guess you're just too dumb to get your head around it." Which is facially untrue; as you point out, it's X's own blind spot with respect to pedagogy that leads X to this conclusion. Futurism, insofar as it is a discipline at all, is a discipline of autodidacts; it's knitted together from so many different fields that while an individual may be a pedagogically trained expert in one area, such as computer science or biology, getting a full understanding of the class of problems that futurists want to solve requires self-driven learning.

I've noticed that people who do hands-on work, like plumbing or car repair, are often better at communicating not only the "what"s but also the "why"s and "how"s of their knowledge. Again, I can see a few factors that contribute to this. A system like an engine may be quite complicated, but the process of diagnosing and repairing a single problem (say, cylinder not firing) can be used as a jumping-off point to illustrate how the entire system works as a whole (viewed through the lens of how the performance of the car is negatively affected). Do this enough times with enough problems, and you've successfully trained a new auto mechanic, because your student has gained the hands-on experience to recognize problems and understand what components of the system are responsible for those problems, in what ways. Futurism is also a problem-solving discipline; the problems it seeks to answer are mainly of the form "There isn't enough X in the world" (where X = years of life available to each human, strong AI, space travel, whatever). It's easy to get someone to understand why you would want to be able to fix a car; getting someone to understand why you would want to fix an existential problem might first require getting them to understand that the problem is a problem in the first place, but if you can communicate that, then communicating what you want to do about it becomes purposeful. I wonder how often the "dumb, narrow-minded" opinion gets formed because a specialist was trying to explain a solution to something which the hearer hadn't considered as a problem? It's hard to stay interested in evaluating a solution if one hasn't explored the problem space oneself at least a little bit, and even harder to make a meaningful evaluation!

It occurs to me that there are two religious groups which use this mentor/apprentice model to great effect: the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Both send out missionaries, door-to-door, to engage people in conversations about problems. If a missionary concludes that the person doesn't consider the topic to be a problem and that s/he can't convince the person that it is ("no, I'm not concerned about my immortal soul because I don't have one, have a nice day"), s/he can move on quickly. The goal, however, is to find people who are receptive to the notion of the problem, spend some time assessing them through conversation, then get them to commit to meeting up again (perhaps after reading some literature) to talk further so that the missionary can present their (or, rather, their church's) solution. They're not just spreading memes, they're incubating them.

Now, I personally find door-to-door missionaries an annoying interruption and I think I would be pretty irritated if a transhumanist showed up on my doorstep to offer me a tract and asked "Have you ever thought about whether you could live forever?" But, again taking a cue from Christianity, I think the idea of "witnessing" to people about futurist ideas -- in the sense of getting them intrigued and excited -- in a casual setting, like Matt's airport conversation, has a lot of power. Much ink has been spilled on the subject of doing this from a religious angle; again, there's a lot more organisation there than many people may give religious groups credit for ;)

(1) I totally almost typed "idiosocratic" there.

I feel like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek gets a bad rap from today's liberals and progressives, mainly because his support of free markets (particularly free global markets) made him the darling of Republicans from the beginning and especially the Reagan administration. I recently re-read his essay "Why I am Not A Conservative", which along with his famous The Road to Serfdom is what made me fall in love with him in the first place. Reading them, I came to realise that Hayek's principles place two values at the top: liberty and evidence-based reasoning. Reality is his ultimate arbiter, the scientific method his methodology, and maximising individual freedom his foremost goal. His support of free markets comes from a long, hard study of different societies, their economies, and the freedoms their citizens enjoy. He's not talking about the keep-the-poor-in-their-place "not with my tax dollars!" take on freedom that many tea-partiers espouse, either, as these quotes from The Road to Serfdom show:

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

The preservation of competition [is not] incompatible with an extensive system of social services -- so long as the organization of those services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.

I wanted to tweet a bunch of Hayek quotes, but he doesn't condense well. So that's what blogs are for. Imma let him finish, with the following choice bits from "Why I Am Not A Conservative". (Where he says "liberal" you may wish to read "libertarian", though that is not the term he would have used.)

On science, spirituality, and morality:

Though the liberal certainly does not regard all change as progress, he does regard the advance of knowledge as one of the chief aims of human effort and expects from it the gradual solution of such problems and difficulties as we can hope to solve. Without preferring the new merely because it is new, the liberal is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not.

I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position.

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.

What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused.

On diversity and tolerance:

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.

I have little doubt that some of my conservative friends will be shocked by what they will regard as "concessions" to modern views that I have made in Part III of this book. But, though I may dislike some of the measures concerned as much as they do and might vote against them, I know of no general principles to which I could appeal to persuade those of a different view that those measures are not permissible in the general kind of society which we both desire.

[T]he most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.

[T]he more a person dislikes the strange and thinks his own ways superior, the more he tends to regard it as his mission to "civilize" other - not by the voluntary and unhampered intercourse which the liberal favors, but by bringing them the blessings of efficient government.

[T]he fact that I prefer and feel reverence for some of the traditions of my society need not be the cause of hostility to what is strange and different.

On institutionalised power, coercion, and privilege (in 1960, guys!):

While the conservative inclines to defend a particular established hierarchy and wishes authority to protect the status of those whom he values, the liberal feels that no respect for established values can justify the resort to privilege or monopoly or any other coercive power of the state in order to shelter such people against the forces of economic change.

On why you should choose your allies carefully:

This difference between liberalism and conservatism must not be obscured by the fact that in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes.

On conservatives' resistance to change versus liberals' readiness to adapt to change:

[Conservatism] by its very nature cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. [....] What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.

The admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past. They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge.

(Particularly relevant to the emergence of free/open-source software, neh? And along the same lines:)

[O]ne of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.

You might or might not be familiar with the blog Slacktivist, perhaps best known for its ongoing exegesis of the wretched theology and even worse writing in the Left Behind novels. The blog ran for years on typepad.com, and recently its author, Fred Clark, moved it to the Patheos portal in the interest of engaging with the broader ecumenical/interfaith¹ community.

During its time at TypePad, the blog developed a diverse community of commenters and a set of social mores that made it a much-needed safe space for many of those participants. In the move to Patheos, many of those norms turned out to be alien to new readers, which prompted the sort of flamewars you'd expect, plenty of 101 discussions with the usual attendant grumbling, and an interesting deconstruction of the hidden assumptions bundled up in the tone argument:

Certainly there is a place for attempting to persuade bigots and the callous that they are wrong. This is valuable work, and probably not achieved well by nuking. You catch more flies with honey and all that.

However, when all responses to bigotry are polite and civil, that sends two messages. It tells the bigot that their opinion is within the range of acceptable opinions for polite disagreement, and it tells the victims of bigotry that their basic humanity is open to debate, which in turn tells them that everyone, not just the bigot, agrees that their humanity is questionable.

I'm metaphorically kicking myself for not having noticed this independently. While I've generally had more success persuading individuals with reasoned discourse than with the Flamethrower of Justice, I'm now pondering instances where I could have busted out the flamethrower but didn't and might have thereby shored up a racist/sexist/homophobe's unexamined belief that there was room for his/her bigotry in civil society.

In the couple of years that I've been mostly lurking in various anti-prejudice communities, I've noticed that allies -- and I include myself in that group -- tend to be rather incrementalist in our approach to bigots. The attitude seems to be that we can eradicate prejudice through a combination of reason and stealth: that by guiding a bigot through the process of examining his/her assumptions with the lens of Discourse With Someone They Identify With More Than Those Other Guys, we can expose those assumptions as faulty. Part of the popularity of this approach is that it works, at least to the extent that the other member of the dialogue is interested in that sort of self-examination.

Where it breaks down, though, is the extent. Bigotry isn't rational, and the vast majority of people don't establish their beliefs by sitting down with graph paper and a mechanical pencil to work out an internally consistent set of principles. We're social animals, and our social norms are fluid, influenced by the words and actions of whatever group we happen to be interacting with. If you're hanging out with a group composed entirely of white people and someone busts out a racist joke, it's not easy to stand up and say "That's not okay -- not even here." But it's the right thing to do, and in the long run it's the only thing that will provoke a shift in social norms. Bigots get away with being bigots because they don't expect to draw opprobrium for doing or saying something bigoted. Contrapositively, allies often do expect to be mocked or criticized for lighting up a bigot, and too often keep our mouths shut when we ought to be doing our part to push bigotry out of the realm of acceptable behaviour.

Or, taking a less charitable view of human nature: Small-minded people don't give a shit about reason, but they sure do care what other people think of them.

I don't like the idea of shaming people into behaving in a civilised fashion, but as any member of a minority knows, shame is a mighty powerful weapon. It's also one that bigots have been using, quite effectively I might add, approximately as long as bigotry has existed. There's a scene in the movie Milk where Harvey Milk tells his supporters that if they want to change anything, they're going to have to out themselves. Now, this isn't some sort of Kantian categorical imperative, and we can discuss why in the comments if anyone cares to -- but Harvey's point, with that particular set of people at that particular time in history, was that the community was allowing bigots to trample it because the members were afraid of being shamed for their sexual orientation. Imagine, if you will, a society where holding the belief that gay people shouldn't marry each other or that rape jokes are okay or that black people's experiences don't matter was considered so benighted that people who actually held such beliefs were powerless to act on them out of fear of rejection. I don't consider such a society ideal, but it sure would be a damn sight better for PoCs et al than what we have right now.

In other words, allies, we need to step up the game when it comes to outing ourselves. At the end of the day, reason and attrition will still be the mechanisms that eradicate the virus of bigotry from our society -- but, just to beat the metaphor to death, we need to quarantine the virus in order to give the antivirals time to work.

¹I can't think of a good adjective in the same vein that also includes atheists, but for what it's worth, the site also features atheist writers and there's a humanism portal on the way.