If you follow dev twitter, you would have seen yet again further outrage over ‘Uncle Bob’ Martin, who was ‘de-platformed’ from a conference recently. I’ve posted similarly about this before when the John Sonmez saga played out. I focused on the argument regarding consequences for speech back then and how they’re equivalent to threats for anyone thinking of speaking out similar ideas. People also like to call it accountability, as Thomas Chatteron Williams writes: “being held to account implies an opportunity to explain oneself” - when have you seen a mob relent and give anyone that opportunity?

Regarding the conference, I tweeted that I think it’s against free speech for certain other speakers to threaten the conference organiser and say, “we’re not speaking if he is.” Further to that, there is the implied threat of being labeled as someone who supports X where you’ll be guilty by association, at least according to them. I know some of you will now be thinking of commenting that XKCD cartoon, which seems to have become the very definition of what free speech is on twitter. To regard a comic, as simple as that, treats the concept of free speech with an extraordinary amount of contempt. Here’s the cartoon:

The misunderstanding from this cartoon is that all it deals with is the legal aspect of free speech. To quote Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay:

We are not talking about the legal aspect of freedom of speech such as specific laws or constitutions of specific countries around the principle of freedom of speech, e.g., the US First Amendment. These legal structures relate to the principle of freedom of speech, but they are not the principle of freedom of speech. That principle is much, much broader and extends much further than how governments may or may not interfere with public speech.

[…]

We are talking about a principled defense of the free exchange of ideas on many levels of society; an acknowledgement that this is a basic human freedom and an understanding that viewpoint diversity and the whole process of arguing, questioning, challenging, doubting, refuting, and revising ideas is essential to the advancement of knowledge, to social progress, and to liberal democracy itself. In short, we are talking about what Jonathan Rauch describes as “liberal science,” the development of which in Western modernity has a long and multi-faceted intellectual history. It includes key liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill but also thinkers and political activists as diverse as Puritans and secularists, Marxists and Libertarians. Though rarely seen this way, it is, in fact, an advanced social technology. Establishing the “marketplace of ideas” as the most positive model for a successful and progressive society took hundreds of years and much hard work.

I strongly suggest you read the full post. My favourite part of the post is how it breaks freedom of speech into four different sets of freedoms:

1. The freedom to speak — Individuals may express all ideas without hindrance or punishment.
2. The freedom to listen — Individuals may listen to all ideas without hindrance or punishment.
3. The freedom not to speak — Individuals must not to be required to express any ideas or speak to any person.
4. The freedom not to listen — Individuals must not to be forced to listen to any ideas or any person.

One of the things that I first learned from Christopher Hitchens is that free speech isn’t just about the right to speak, but the right to listen.

While you have the right to listen, you cannot be forced to listen, that choice lies with every individual, and it is their decision to make. While you may not like someone speaking at a conference, you have the choice of either listening, perhaps for educational purposes or you could decide to go elsewhere.

I don’t think it is acceptable to impose a decision you’ve made about whether to listen to someone or not on to a group of other people. While you may have the goal of ‘protecting’ other people from ‘hate speech’, you have instead taken away the responsibility for people to decide for themselves. Some people may be okay with someone else deciding for them what they can listen to, not me, and I hope not yourself either. No matter what, nobody can live up to that role of being a censor who can reliably determine in advance what the consequences are of someone speaking. It is also pretty insulting. If someone is so obviously racist or hateful - is everyone else but you too stupid to decide that for themselves?

This isn’t new, as an atheist, I’ve seen the ‘Islamaphobic’ slur thrown around at the slightest criticism of Islam. It’s not only Muslims who use this slur, there are a great deal of people who will also use the word with the belief that they’re sticking up for a minority that needs protecting. Here’s an example of Ben Affleck doing this very thing to Sam Harris, not at any point of time was Ben willing to listen to anything Sam had to say and actually proved the point Sam was making. Ben is sitting there in a fit of rage, and all he can think about is ‘racist.’

Black Lives Matter has made race an issue mentioned a lot recently. Still, any discussion or debate around any of the ideas raised is firmly shot down with an accusation of bigotry. Discussion is being severely discouraged by bullying those who disagree with the consensus of a mob. Consensus of an idea does not mean it’s correct or right - this is the logical fallacy argumentum ad populum.

In Uncle Bob’s specific case, this has happened, and Bob is now frequently labeled a ‘racist.’ People appear to be happy to jump aboard these trains without knowing exactly why someone is a racist. In Uncle Bob’s case, asking ‘why?’ usually ended up with you being called a ’tech bro’ or a troll. That was until two people decided to write a blog post to explain why, which then became everyone’s source of ‘why’ funnily enough. I’ve read both posts - the content in both of them is mind-numbing, yet you’ll see plenty of ’excellent read’ comments on twitter about both of them. I encourage you to read them for yourself.

The first post is called Tech Bullshit Explained: Uncle Bob. Its comments on agile are particularly funny; it certainly likes to make race an issue here. However, lets jump straight to the justification for Bob being a racist:

So back to the bad tweets. There are lots of them. Most recently Uncle Bob decided to tweet this about the police:

The police are not the problem. The police were never the problem. Defunding the police is a terrible policy that will put hundreds, if not thousands, of lives at risk.

Let’s think about the context here. The US is in the midst of widespread protests against police killings of Black people. Uncle Bob has devoted 0 posts to supporting protests or even middling reform efforts. In this context, this Tweet is pretty damn racist.

Disagreement about the police being the problem in these shootings is where ‘racist’ came from. I happen to think the police are part of the problem but in any case I don’t believe this makes someone racist. This is where the emotional outrage comes in and I know some of you reading this will start feeling it. ‘How can you say that’s not racist when black people are being shot by cops everyday?’ - suppress the emotional reasoning if you would be so kind.

I don’t want anyone being shot, and I don’t justify the cops shooting these people either. But, it’s important to understand that the very presence of these videos doesn’t mean that these people were shot because of racism. There are so many factors at play here, I concede that racism is certainly a possibility but this needs to be investigated thoroughly - jumping to the idea that all these cops are racist is likely to do more harm than good. We’re already in a situation where police officers in the US are now considered by many to be systemically racist, how is this going to affect the way a person of colour responds to the police? Are they going to rebel and refuse to follow instructions which leads to weapons being drawn putting their lives at risk? Or perhaps they’re going to try and evade because they’re so worried they’re going to be killed?

Racism is a hasty conclusion to an extremely complex problem. Here’s a video as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRwdFplrspM. Imagine being that police officer - can you understand why police officers appear to be so skittish and are quick to pull out a gun? What could that officer had done differently?

I’m trying to be really clear here as I know full well that someone who happens to dislike me at some point now or in the future would love to use this post to label me a racist or something of the kind. I am not saying that racism isn’t an issue, I am saying we need to investigate and in the mean time acknowledge some of the uncertainty around what the exact issues are. If the uncomfortable questions aren’t asked, like whether or not black people commit more crime than white people proportionally, for example - we’re never going to get to the core of the problem of what’s happening here. There can be no discussion at all if asking an uncomfortable question ends up with you being shouted down as a bigot.

The other post I mentioned is a A Quick Primer on Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin. The first part is entirely technical and I would be drifting away from the core message of my blog post if I challenged all of those arguments. To disregard an entire book based on a few code samples, where the most important code sample according to this author is where Bob had a class with 15 methods and 13 of them had side effects - I’m not sure what to say. There are 17 chapters in that book, there’s a lot of content too - a lot of which I would rate as worth reading. The author of the post meanwhile reviewed a book and explained why you shouldn’t read it without first reading it themselves:

I have not read Clean Code, but based on excerpts and reviews from people I trust, I don’t really feel that I need to. I’ve read enough clearly bad advice from direct quotes from it that I don’t particularly want to spend my time reading the whole thing.

And yup, people take this post seriously. At least the author was upfront and honest about it. Here’s the reasoning for Bob being a racist:

Martin says that he’s “disgusted” by the NFL players who didn’t stand during the national anthem and that they should be fired (he’s against cancel culture though, and thinks that it’s “evil” to get people fired for debate). He also writes that police do not target people of color, and that the United States was not founded on slavery.

I think the NFL players should be free to do whatever they like during an anthem, but being ‘disgusted’ by it isn’t racist in itself. People take their anthems seriously; there was a big news storm in the UK when Jeremy Corbyn didn’t sing the national anthem. I think it’s nuts personally, but I can’t take that as far as any -ism. The point of hypocrisy from Bob about people being fired is a valid one. I think he is indeed a hypocrite. Call him out on it. It’s not racist, though.

Lastly, there’s a link to a Facebook post where Bob shares his opinion about there not being a fundamental issue of racism in the US and explains some of the data. The response here isn’t to respond with ‘racist’ or ‘white supremacist’ - the response is to look at the data and argue back with why Bob is wrong. The ‘data’ for the current race issues seems to be all over the place, depending on what publication you read - we need some honest research into this. My fear is that research won’t be published because of the attacks anything would receive if it didn’t agree with the opinion of a mob.

Stephen Pinker tweeted, “police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately” with a link to a post about the research into racial discrimination and policing. You bet, he too got the same ‘racist’ treatment with an attempt to ‘cancel’ Stephen and make him lose his job.

The thing I find most sad about all of this drama is that most of these people tweeting this stuff are university educated. Some of them from places like Harvard no less - and yet, these very same people are against any discussion of things they “know” to be right but are unable to back up substantially. Research isn’t always correct; research isn’t published on the premise that it is entirely correct. It’s published so that other academics can look at the research and either find flaws or respond with agreement/disagreement or for other researchers to do further research in the same area. This leads to academic progress. If researchers are scared to publish papers that will be ‘uncomfortable’ reads, we lose that. The research stays secret, it doesn’t get thoroughly examined, and we make far less progress than we otherwise would have.

This isn’t just about researchers, however. Debating or arguing topics like this on forums or on twitter, or even in private is almost never a waste of anyone’s time. By arguing and debating and having our own beliefs challenged, we learn and understand even more about what we think than we otherwise would. Could you debate with a flat earther who’s come out with all of these scientific-sounding arguments? Could you really respond with something that doesn’t sound like ‘I know the earth’s round because that’s what they taught me in school’? Many people couldn’t, but by sure after the debate, you’ll do the research. From that point on, you’ll be able to not only share what you think but justify it too.

Lastly, for those that feel they need to censor speech by threatening to quit a publication if someone else with another opinion is published, or say ‘I’m not speaking at your conference if he’s speaking’ - please stop this nonsense. If you’re running a conference, invite whoever you like. That’s fine. If you’re speaking at another conference and threatening the conference organiser about who they have invited, you’re being a bully and attempting to censor.

I believe in the marketplace of ideas; people know a crappy speaker when they see one. While I’m a massive fan of Christopher Hitchens, I don’t have much respect for his brother, Peter Hitchens at all. If he happened to be speaking near me, I certainly wouldn’t try and stop him from speaking, though. I’d likely try and go myself for the learning experience. To be better at challenging ideas you disagree with, you need to listen to those ideas. By preventing people from listening, you prevent them from forming their own set of reasons for why X is an asshole and should be ignored. Instead, they’re told X is an asshole and isn’t worth listening to.