Curtis Yarvin submitted a talk in the Strange Loop 2015 Call for Presentations. The talk went through the review process and was one of about 60 talks selected for the conference out of about 360. The subject of the talk was urbit (attached below). While we use a multi-stage review process, ultimately all final decisions are made by me.

Earlier this week we published the bulk of the 2015 Strange Loop session list, including Curtis's talk. I quickly received feedback that Curtis also has an online persona under the name "Mencius Moldbug" where he has posted extensive political writings.

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis's writings objectionable. I have not personally read them.

I am trying to create a conference where the focus is on the technology and the topics being presented. Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus. This would not serve the conference, the other speakers, the attendees, or even Curtis.

Thus, I chose to rescind Curtis's invitation and remove him from the program. The email I sent to Curtis is included below for reference.

Alex Miller
June 4, 2015


### Curtis Yarvin's talk abstract

Title:    urbit, a clean-slate functional stack

Abstract: urbit is a new execution stack designed from scratch.  The VM is a combinator automaton, nock, defined in 200 words.  A strict, typed functional language, hoon, compiles itself to nock.  arvo is an event-sourced OS in hoon, designed as a personal cloud server.  While urbit still scales poorly, it's stable enough to host a distributed chat network and serve React apps.  The whole system is about 25,000 lines of code, all MIT licensed and patent-free.

Since none of urbit's layers fits well in any system-software family tree, its key disadvantage is that you need to learn to program again.  It's also pretty slow, though we think we know how to make it fast.  In exchange you get: a logical computer whose entire lifecycle is deterministic; a single-level store ("NoDB") where every packet is a transaction; an authenticated, encrypted network with a global immutable namespace; typed functional programming without category theory; typed, exactly-once network messages; and lots of other cool stuff that anyone sensible these days would put in a system software stack if she got the chance to design one.
Comments: The attendee will see urbit in action and come away believing that it's actually real.  They will see enough of what it does and doesn't do well to decide if they like it or not.
 
### Email from Alex Miller to Curtis Yarvin

Hi Curtis,

When your talk was posted on the Strange Loop web site today, I had immediate and vigorous feedback about the fact that you would be speaking at Strange Loop. I do not generally make any attempt to audit or care about the particular opinions or ideology of the people that I accept as speakers; I am generally focused on the content of the talks themselves. 

However, in this case it is clear to me that your opinions in areas outside your talk are concerning enough for a significantly large number of attendees that those reactions are overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction for launching the conference as a whole. Because of this, I am sorry that I must rescind your invitation and I will not be able to accept or include your talk at the conference. My apologies if this causes you any inconvenience.