#Cancel FinCon

[Buffaloski Boris]

Here is a link to a story in "Medium" about Philip Taylor and his ultimate departure from FinCon, an event that is of interest to many within the FI community. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually held this year.   

https://medium.com/@boylan.mm/cancel-fincon-2b768c8ccbe4

[lost_in_the_endless_aisle]

Here is a link to a story in "Medium" about Philip Taylor and his ultimate departure from FinCon, an event that is of interest to many within the FI community. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually held this year.   

https://medium.com/@boylan.mm/cancel-fincon-2b768c8ccbe4

"I don't even tweet for $2,500" IDK, maybe the internet was better before it was so effectively monetized. I can't back a horse in this race.

[bacchi]

^^ Yeah, I've heard of FinCon but have never heard of any of the others. I guess I'm not much of a PF fan.

Monetizing PF for a big payoff. There's some irony there.

[js82]

Here is a link to a story in "Medium" about Philip Taylor and his ultimate departure from FinCon, an event that is of interest to many within the FI community. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually held this year.   

https://medium.com/@boylan.mm/cancel-fincon-2b768c8ccbe4

"I don't even tweet for $2,500" IDK, maybe the internet was better before it was so effectively monetized. I can't back a horse in this race.

If we're going to talk about the monetization of internet "content" (I use that term loosely), can we also talk about the general absurdity of paying to attend personal finance "conventions"?  In general it strikes me as a great deal of irrational celebrity worship as opposed to an efficient source of learning, and spending money on something that's rather unproductive in the grand scheme of things.

Don't love cancel culture, also don't love the idea of paying a bunch of money for a bunch information I can find for a fraction of the price in books or on the internet,

[Travis]

Here is a link to a story in "Medium" about Philip Taylor and his ultimate departure from FinCon, an event that is of interest to many within the FI community. It'll be interesting to see if it's actually held this year.   

https://medium.com/@boylan.mm/cancel-fincon-2b768c8ccbe4

"I don't even tweet for $2,500" IDK, maybe the internet was better before it was so effectively monetized. I can't back a horse in this race.

If we're going to talk about the monetization of internet "content" (I use that term loosely), can we also talk about the general absurdity of paying to attend personal finance "conventions"?  In general it strikes me as a great deal of irrational celebrity worship as opposed to an efficient source of learning, and spending money on something that's rather unproductive in the grand scheme of things.

Don't love cancel culture, also don't love the idea of paying a bunch of money for a bunch information I can find for a fraction of the price in books or on the internet,

How many speakers have a free blog?

[obstinate]

When everything you need to know basically fits on a notecard, why does it matter if they have a free blog or not? All the necessary and vastly more unnecessary information is free. Nothing said at these conferences needs to be said or heard.

That said, if people get value from it, far be it from me to tell them how to spend.

[Dicey]

Wow! That's a world I know nothing about. And yet, somehow, without spending any thing more than pocket change on a book or two (Love my library!), I am enjoying my seventh full year of FIRE and am looking forward to many more...

[Maenad]

If we're going to talk about the monetization of internet "content" (I use that term loosely), can we also talk about the general absurdity of paying to attend personal finance "conventions"?  In general it strikes me as a great deal of irrational celebrity worship as opposed to an efficient source of learning, and spending money on something that's rather unproductive in the grand scheme of things.

The impression I'd gotten was that FinCon is aimed at PF bloggers, so those of us who aren't trying to make money off of PF knowledge/info/opinions wouldn't really find any value in it anyway. Though I agree that, like the Chatauquas that JLCollins promotes, it feels... weird? Absurd? to spend money to rub elbows with people when everyone involved is supposed to be enthusiastic around saving money and/or only spending on what's really important.

I do agree with the article that Cancel Culture is just... not beneficial. I think a lot of it is a reaction to decades of insincere faux-pologies by politicians, actors, etc. when they do something bad, and decades of powerful people being assholes and never being held accountable for it. This is the understandable overreaction to the abuses of power that have been going on for a long time. However, there needs to be some middle ground, there needs to be an ability for people to actually apologize, make amends, and do better, as well as being held accountable if they don't do that.

And I'm not exactly enamored with FinCon's response to things like paying minority or female bloggers less - they said that they negotiate the fees separately for each speaker, but there's a lot of evidence that that kind of practice does indeed lead to women and minorities being paid less, just like in the corporate world. So I'm not convinced that they're really doing everything they can to be egalitarian and to reach out to underrepresented demographics.

[bacchi]

I do agree with the article that Cancel Culture is just... not beneficial. I think a lot of it is a reaction to decades of insincere faux-pologies by politicians, actors, etc. when they do something bad, and decades of powerful people being assholes and never being held accountable for it. This is the understandable overreaction to the abuses of power that have been going on for a long time. However, there needs to be some middle ground, there needs to be an ability for people to actually apologize, make amends, and do better, as well as being held accountable if they don't do that.

+1 More succinct than I could've written.

Every passionate movement/revolution goes too far. The US saw "cancel culture" in the 50s with McCarthyism. We're now seeing it from the left and, because of the ubiquitous nature of the internet, it's front and center and immediate.

[GuitarStv]

The extremely one sided article doesn't seem to give the full story.  Probably because as a hard core libertarian, the blogger is attempting to generate outrage and get people excited about about something.

If you make your living by being a spokesperson for something . . . then you have to avoid posting stupid shit that may rile people up.  I guess you could call that 'cancel culture', but I see it as people exercising their freedom of choice to ignore people (or cut them out of their lives) if they find what they say/do reprehensible.  Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, and nobody in the world owes you a second chance.  If this seems too difficult a tightrope to have to walk, then don't use social media and you won't have problems of this sort.

[bacchi]

The extremely one sided article doesn't seem to give the full story.  Probably because as a hard core libertarian, the blogger is attempting to generate outrage and get people excited about about something.

Ok, I trusted the telling. There's good reason to be skeptical.*



*One of her articles is titled, "Why Aren’t Libertarian Values More Popular? Maybe Americans Don’t Love Liberty." Ha. (Though if you're libertarian, it should be perfectly ok for people and companies to "cancel" someone.)

[mathlete]

^^ Yeah, I've heard of FinCon but have never heard of any of the others. I guess I'm not much of a PF fan.

Monetizing PF for a big payoff. There's some irony there.

I think we need to re-examine the fundamentals of why so many people get rich off of selling affiliate ads on blog posts about how advertisers are out to separate you from your money.

[mathlete]

The extremely one sided article doesn't seem to give the full story.  Probably because as a hard core libertarian, the blogger is attempting to generate outrage and get people excited about about something.

Ok, I trusted the telling. There's good reason to be skeptical.*



*One of her articles is titled, "Why Aren’t Libertarian Values More Popular? Maybe Americans Don’t Love Liberty." Ha. (Though if you're libertarian, it should be perfectly ok for people and companies to "cancel" someone.)

Yes but when we like cancel culture, we call it, "Voting with your dollars". ;-)

[Travis]

When everything you need to know basically fits on a notecard, why does it matter if they have a free blog or not? All the necessary and vastly more unnecessary information is free. Nothing said at these conferences needs to be said or heard.

That said, if people get value from it, far be it from me to tell them how to spend.

That was my point.  The article is making a fuss about FinCon speakers and their fees, but outside the conference you can get most of what they're going to say in the normal course of their other platforms.  I'm not someone who would pay to attend a convention like this, but a lot of other folks do.

[mathlete]

That was my point.  The article is making a fuss about FinCon speakers and their fees, but outside the conference you can get most of what they're going to say in the normal course of their other platforms.  I'm not someone who would pay to attend a convention like this, but a lot of other folks do.

Yeah if the author of the article was trying to get us to weep because our sacred cow is being murdered by the evils of cancel culture... she picked a bad sacred cow. I don't think any of us actually care fuck all about FinCon.

The subhead is, "How one tweet disrupted a tightly knit personal finance community".

Disingenuous on two fronts. "One tweet" is obviously reductive. And this isn't the tight knit PF community. It's the tight knit community of people who profit off of PF.

[Tyler durden]

Cancel culture seems to be getting worse not better. We can vote with our dollars as mentioned above, and that’s why big corporations have treaded lightly in the past around politics. This new cancel culture is far more damaging.

Someone makes a comment that 95% of people would say is harmless but gets called a racist / sexist whatever ist and they lose their job. Take the college professor who was fired for not allowing black students to get a free pass on exams.

https://www.theblaze.com/psuedo-intellectual/ucla-professor-suspended

Sure someone can keep their mouth shut on Twitter easily enough but people are being cancelled for doing nothing wrong. Many more examples of this same type of behavior. It’s one thing to see college cry babies protest any speaker who leans right but getting professors fired is nuts.

Brett Weinstein has his own podcast where he talks about this and was on the joe Rogan podcast recently as well. He covers how the college cry babies and their protests are spilling out into the real world now.

Scary stuff.

[mathlete]

You can brag about grabbing women's pussies and still be handed the nuclear codes and the ability to make judicial appointments. Cancel culture is about 150,000th on the list of problems I'm worried about.

An audience and advertisers has given Joe Rogan lots of money and a platform to say whatever he wants and he chooses to spend an awful lot of time complaining about how you can't say anything anymore. Funny how that works.

[Buffaloski Boris]

Cancel culture seems to be getting worse not better. We can vote with our dollars as mentioned above, and that’s why big corporations have treaded lightly in the past around politics. This new cancel culture is far more damaging.

Someone makes a comment that 95% of people would say is harmless but gets called a racist / sexist whatever ist and they lose their job. Take the college professor who was fired for not allowing black students to get a free pass on exams.

https://www.theblaze.com/psuedo-intellectual/ucla-professor-suspended

Sure someone can keep their mouth shut on Twitter easily enough but people are being cancelled for doing nothing wrong. Many more examples of this same type of behavior. It’s one thing to see college cry babies protest any speaker who leans right but getting professors fired is nuts.

Brett Weinstein has his own podcast where he talks about this and was on the joe Rogan podcast recently as well. He covers how the college cry babies and their protests are spilling out into the real world now.

Scary stuff.

Looks to me like the neo-Stalinists of the left don’t want to be outdone by the neo-McCarthyists of the right. They look to be locked in a race to see who can be the most authoritarian and repressive. Maybe it’s a sort of olympics for kakistocrats?

I find it more interesting to see people built up rather than torn down.  Obviously I’d be a really crappy and unsuccessful politician.

[Tyler durden]

You can brag about grabbing women's pussies and still be handed the nuclear codes and the ability to make judicial appointments. Cancel culture is about 150,000th on the list of problems I'm worried about.

An audience and advertisers has given Joe Rogan lots of money and a platform to say whatever he wants and he chooses to spend an awful lot of time complaining about how you can't say anything anymore. Funny how that works.

Well yes... orange man is bad.

I’m still concerned with this growing cancel culture. It’s enabling people to whine and get people fired when something offends them.

Orange man is duly elected with people being aware of his comments. It’s free choice at least.

Better to try and strangle this idea or thinking in the womb than allow it to take hold.

[Tyler durden]

Cancel culture seems to be getting worse not better. We can vote with our dollars as mentioned above, and that’s why big corporations have treaded lightly in the past around politics. This new cancel culture is far more damaging.

Someone makes a comment that 95% of people would say is harmless but gets called a racist / sexist whatever ist and they lose their job. Take the college professor who was fired for not allowing black students to get a free pass on exams.

https://www.theblaze.com/psuedo-intellectual/ucla-professor-suspended

Sure someone can keep their mouth shut on Twitter easily enough but people are being cancelled for doing nothing wrong. Many more examples of this same type of behavior. It’s one thing to see college cry babies protest any speaker who leans right but getting professors fired is nuts.

Brett Weinstein has his own podcast where he talks about this and was on the joe Rogan podcast recently as well. He covers how the college cry babies and their protests are spilling out into the real world now.

Scary stuff.

Looks to me like the neo-Stalinists of the left don’t want to be outdone by the neo-McCarthyists of the right. They look to be locked in a race to see who can be the most authoritarian and repressive. Maybe it’s a sort of olympics for kakistocrats?

I find it more interesting to see people built up rather than torn down.  Obviously I’d be a really crappy and unsuccessful politician.

I don’t know if I see it as left / right. I guess the college complainers can be viewed as left but I honestly see it more like spoiled brat kids who cry when they don’t get their way. We’ve all met them in our lives.

[js82]

I don’t know if I see it as left / right. I guess the college complainers can be viewed as left but I honestly see it more like spoiled brat kids who cry when they don’t get their way. We’ve all met them in our lives.

If you see the problem as "spoiled brat kids" you're looking at the world through a one-sided lens.

It may look different when they do it, but it happens from both ends of the political spectrum and over a wide range of ages/demographics.

[Tyler durden]

I don’t know if I see it as left / right. I guess the college complainers can be viewed as left but I honestly see it more like spoiled brat kids who cry when they don’t get their way. We’ve all met them in our lives.

If you see the problem as "spoiled brat kids" you're looking at the world through a one-sided lens.

It may look different when they do it, but it happens from both ends of the political spectrum and over a wide range of ages/demographics.

I can look at this through many angles or lenses but I’ll tell you one is as a parent. If my kids got a professor fired for what I linked to above ( and that’s just one example ) I would be so disappointed. Disappointed is such a parent word !

Let’s level set ? Does anyone condone that behavior ? Maybe I’m really out of touch and this is what other parents teach their kids to behave like this.
I’m not talking about kids holding some rally or vigil for their cause du jour.

I’m talking about people having their careers ruined. 

[GuitarStv]

Cancel culture seems to be getting worse not better. We can vote with our dollars as mentioned above, and that’s why big corporations have treaded lightly in the past around politics. This new cancel culture is far more damaging.

Someone makes a comment that 95% of people would say is harmless but gets called a racist / sexist whatever ist and they lose their job. Take the college professor who was fired for not allowing black students to get a free pass on exams.

https://www.theblaze.com/psuedo-intellectual/ucla-professor-suspended

Sure someone can keep their mouth shut on Twitter easily enough but people are being cancelled for doing nothing wrong. Many more examples of this same type of behavior. It’s one thing to see college cry babies protest any speaker who leans right but getting professors fired is nuts.

Brett Weinstein has his own podcast where he talks about this and was on the joe Rogan podcast recently as well. He covers how the college cry babies and their protests are spilling out into the real world now.

Scary stuff.

Looks to me like the neo-Stalinists of the left don’t want to be outdone by the neo-McCarthyists of the right. They look to be locked in a race to see who can be the most authoritarian and repressive. Maybe it’s a sort of olympics for kakistocrats?

I find it more interesting to see people built up rather than torn down.  Obviously I’d be a really crappy and unsuccessful politician.

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?

[Tyler durden]

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?


I re read the tweet. I would choose not to destroy a mans career over it.

You would destroy it or something in between ?

[js82]

I don’t know if I see it as left / right. I guess the college complainers can be viewed as left but I honestly see it more like spoiled brat kids who cry when they don’t get their way. We’ve all met them in our lives.

If you see the problem as "spoiled brat kids" you're looking at the world through a one-sided lens.

It may look different when they do it, but it happens from both ends of the political spectrum and over a wide range of ages/demographics.

I can look at this through many angles or lenses but I’ll tell you one is as a parent. If my kids got a professor fired for what I linked to above ( and that’s just one example ) I would be so disappointed. Disappointed is such a parent word !

Let’s level set ? Does anyone condone that behavior ? Maybe I’m really out of touch and this is what other parents teach their kids to behave like this.
I’m not talking about kids holding some rally or vigil for their cause du jour.

I’m talking about people having their careers ruined.

My comment was directed not solely at your post, but framing your post in the context of the original topic of this thread (namely, "cancel culture" as a whole), which goes well beyond college students and can look quite a bit different depending on who is doing the cancelling and who is being cancelled.

I'm of the general position that permanent exile from one's profession is not the right solution in the majority of cases.  At least if it's an isolated incident(as opposed to a track record of consistently being a jerk over a long period of time) and more in the category of ignorance/insensitivity rather than malevolence.  I think engagement is a better approach than permanent banishment, provided people are willing to actually engage.  Additionally, there should be a path back to a normal life for someone who has done something wrong, but has changed their ways.

The overarching theme here should be differentiating between people who are actively being jerks/treating others unfairly(and have a track record of doing so), versus someone who is having a bad day/chooses their words poorly/says something offensive out of ignorance rather than intent to offend.  Nuance and context matters.

[GuitarStv]

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?


I re read the tweet. I would choose not to destroy a mans career over it.

You would destroy it or something in between ?

I'm not sure that this response really answered what I was looking for.

The only individual responsible for 'destroying a man's career' that I'm seeing in this case was the man himself.  He chose to have a job where his career depended on public image . . . and then he personally took actions to damage his own public image.  Any loss that resulted was directly in response to what he did.  His 'career' isn't really destroyed either . . . he will just need to take steps over a period of time to slowly rebuild the reputation that he took steps to damage.  No individual was responsible for destroying this man's 'career', it was the collective free action of the public in response to the comments he made.

I guess I was wondering how you would suggest going about achieving the outcome that you desire for this case (no destruction of 'career').  Should the public be prevented in some way from responding the way that they want to when confronted with behavior they don't like?  Should it be required that when a person who does something publicly stupid, others are forced to forgive this person (and if so, how do you propose enforcement of this 'forgiveness')?

My view - responsibility for your personal actions ultimately has to rely with you.  If my career precariously depended on the things I posted online I would either:
- change careers
- be extremely careful not to post controversial/offensive things online
Getting upset that other people aren't giving me a second chance after I choose to do something stupid that damages my online persona/credibility and therefore impacts my chosen 'career' seems to be a total abdication of personal responsibility.  It's weird to me to get upset that there are consequences for actions.

[StarBright]

That was my point.  The article is making a fuss about FinCon speakers and their fees, but outside the conference you can get most of what they're going to say in the normal course of their other platforms.  I'm not someone who would pay to attend a convention like this, but a lot of other folks do.

Yeah if the author of the article was trying to get us to weep because our sacred cow is being murdered by the evils of cancel culture... she picked a bad sacred cow. I don't think any of us actually care fuck all about FinCon.

The subhead is, "How one tweet disrupted a tightly knit personal finance community".

Disingenuous on two fronts. "One tweet" is obviously reductive. And this isn't the tight knit PF community. It's the tight knit community of people who profit off of PF.

I believe that author of the piece is also married to or dating a FinCon employee. I googled as soon as I hit the parts where it said something like "despite the horrible attacks FinCon guy kept his cool." - It was so not objective that it stuck out. There is a tweet asking her why she didn't disclose her relationship with an employee and she didn't say there wasn't a relationship, just that, her views are her own.

[Tyler durden]

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?


I re read the tweet. I would choose not to destroy a mans career over it.

You would destroy it or something in between ?

I'm not sure that this response really answered what I was looking for.

The only individual responsible for 'destroying a man's career' that I'm seeing in this case was the man himself.  He chose to have a job where his career depended on public image . . . and then he personally took actions to damage his own public image.  Any loss that resulted was directly in response to what he did.  His 'career' isn't really destroyed either . . . he will just need to take steps over a period of time to slowly rebuild the reputation that he took steps to damage.  No individual was responsible for destroying this man's 'career', it was the collective free action of the public in response to the comments he made.

I guess I was wondering how you would suggest going about achieving the outcome that you desire for this case (no destruction of 'career').  Should the public be prevented in some way from responding the way that they want to when confronted with behavior they don't like?  Should it be required that when a person who does something publicly stupid, others are forced to forgive this person (and if so, how do you propose enforcement of this 'forgiveness')?

My view - responsibility for your personal actions ultimately has to rely with you.  If my career precariously depended on the things I posted online I would either:
- change careers
- be extremely careful not to post controversial/offensive things online
Getting upset that other people aren't giving me a second chance after I choose to do something stupid that damages my online persona/credibility and therefore impacts my chosen 'career' seems to be a total abdication of personal responsibility.  It's weird to me to get upset that there are consequences for actions.

How do we achieve my desired outcome ? Good question. It seems to be a rot in our culture that is growing and getting worse. So how do we cancel cancel culture ?

I have no idea.

I see a harmless tweet and a mans career wrecked. I don’t like it.

My fix ? Raise my kids to not act this way and hope others do the same. Which is really no fix at all.

Do you see this as a good thing that we should hope to see more of ? Is this outcome one you desired ?

[ReadySetMillionaire]

I don't see what's remotely controversial about stating that you are grateful to live in the suburbs and thus be somewhat removed from the chaos that has engulfed our world over the past three months.  The Atlantic just did a 2,500 word article about exactly that -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/pandemic-suburbs-are-best/613300/

That makes the suburbs aspirational, despite all their downsides. The European-modernist retort to their appeal, about which many domestic urbanists fantasize, is more collectivism. But the American response redoubles its bet on individualism: to socialize the ability to hunker down safely and comfortably, whether from plague or any other threat. There are plenty of them, after all. When pandemic worries got sidelined for protests over antiblack police violence, some reformers called on governments to defund the police and reinvest their budgets elsewhere. The New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who supports the idea, was asked how such a society might work. Her answer: “It looks like a suburb.”

I can't tell you how many times I'm glad to live (relatively speaking) in the middle of nowhere, and that has been the truth ten-fold in the past three months.

I guess I'm supposed to keep that truth in the closet so as to not offend people for, who knows, an indefinite period of time.

[mathlete]

Police under orders of the government are beating and gassing protesters and journalists and we're talking about how college kids and twitter people are racing us towards authoritarianism. You can't make this stuff up.

It's impossible to have a good faith discussion on this when people describe backlash against a really stupid comment as neo-stallinism and a mild inconvenience for a PR professional in responsive to a PR mess up as a "career destruction".

Words have meanings.

[mathlete]

I don't see what's remotely controversial about stating that you are grateful to live in the suburbs and thus be somewhat removed from the chaos that has engulfed our world over the past three months.  The Atlantic just did a 2,500 word article about exactly that -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/pandemic-suburbs-are-best/613300/

That makes the suburbs aspirational, despite all their downsides. The European-modernist retort to their appeal, about which many domestic urbanists fantasize, is more collectivism. But the American response redoubles its bet on individualism: to socialize the ability to hunker down safely and comfortably, whether from plague or any other threat. There are plenty of them, after all. When pandemic worries got sidelined for protests over antiblack police violence, some reformers called on governments to defund the police and reinvest their budgets elsewhere. The New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who supports the idea, was asked how such a society might work. Her answer: “It looks like a suburb.”

I can't tell you how many times I'm glad to live (relatively speaking) in the middle of nowhere, and that has been the truth ten-fold in the past three months.

I guess I'm supposed to keep that truth in the closet so as to not offend people for, who knows, an indefinite period of time.

There's more to it than that. It was pretty tonedeaf to begin with. Then he went on to be dismissive of other people's lived experiences. Calling the whole thing media hype.  It's not a crime to be this clueless, but a lot of people (myself included) would prefer it if voices like this weren't driving the narrative in the PF community. I think that's really bad in the long run.

So people don't want to support a FinCon with these kinds of attitudes and cluelessness at the top. Failing to see the problem here.

[GuitarStv]

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?


I re read the tweet. I would choose not to destroy a mans career over it.

You would destroy it or something in between ?

I'm not sure that this response really answered what I was looking for.

The only individual responsible for 'destroying a man's career' that I'm seeing in this case was the man himself.  He chose to have a job where his career depended on public image . . . and then he personally took actions to damage his own public image.  Any loss that resulted was directly in response to what he did.  His 'career' isn't really destroyed either . . . he will just need to take steps over a period of time to slowly rebuild the reputation that he took steps to damage.  No individual was responsible for destroying this man's 'career', it was the collective free action of the public in response to the comments he made.

I guess I was wondering how you would suggest going about achieving the outcome that you desire for this case (no destruction of 'career').  Should the public be prevented in some way from responding the way that they want to when confronted with behavior they don't like?  Should it be required that when a person who does something publicly stupid, others are forced to forgive this person (and if so, how do you propose enforcement of this 'forgiveness')?

My view - responsibility for your personal actions ultimately has to rely with you.  If my career precariously depended on the things I posted online I would either:
- change careers
- be extremely careful not to post controversial/offensive things online
Getting upset that other people aren't giving me a second chance after I choose to do something stupid that damages my online persona/credibility and therefore impacts my chosen 'career' seems to be a total abdication of personal responsibility.  It's weird to me to get upset that there are consequences for actions.

How do we achieve my desired outcome ? Good question. It seems to be a rot in our culture that is growing and getting worse. So how do we cancel cancel culture ?

I have no idea.

I see a harmless tweet and a mans career wrecked. I don’t like it.

Ah.  I see where your confusion might be coming from then.  The tweet wasn't harmless (nor did it stand in isolation) according to his clientele.  But maybe if you look at it from a different angle:

Let's say he was a carpenter who relied on word of mouth . . . and then he built a house that collapsed.  Would you be arguing that it's unfair that people are destroying his career because they're not hiring him to build more houses?

In the case we're discussing the man's 'career' was to separate people from money by offering a comforting public face and some advice they could get for free from almost anywhere else.  He damaged his primary sales tool (his comforting public face) and people don't want to hire him any more.

Is this really a problem at all?  It seems like a pretty natural progression to me.

My fix ? Raise my kids to not act this way and hope others do the same. Which is really no fix at all.

You are raising your children not to act upon the way that they feel based on what they observe?  That is likely to be a difficult task!

Do you see this as a good thing that we should hope to see more of ?  Is this outcome one you desired ?

People are now, and have always been responsible for their own public statements.  Am I happy that the man lost his 'career'?  His career depended on the good-will of the public, which he lost by saying stuff that angered his clientele.  Did I desire this?  No.  My previous post mentioned what I think he should have done to prevent this from happening.

[ReadySetMillionaire]

I don't see what's remotely controversial about stating that you are grateful to live in the suburbs and thus be somewhat removed from the chaos that has engulfed our world over the past three months.  The Atlantic just did a 2,500 word article about exactly that -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/pandemic-suburbs-are-best/613300/

That makes the suburbs aspirational, despite all their downsides. The European-modernist retort to their appeal, about which many domestic urbanists fantasize, is more collectivism. But the American response redoubles its bet on individualism: to socialize the ability to hunker down safely and comfortably, whether from plague or any other threat. There are plenty of them, after all. When pandemic worries got sidelined for protests over antiblack police violence, some reformers called on governments to defund the police and reinvest their budgets elsewhere. The New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who supports the idea, was asked how such a society might work. Her answer: “It looks like a suburb.”

I can't tell you how many times I'm glad to live (relatively speaking) in the middle of nowhere, and that has been the truth ten-fold in the past three months.

I guess I'm supposed to keep that truth in the closet so as to not offend people for, who knows, an indefinite period of time.

There's more to it than that. It was pretty tonedeaf to begin with. Then he went on to be dismissive of other people's lived experiences. Calling the whole thing media hype.  It's not a crime to be this clueless, but a lot of people (myself included) would prefer it if voices like this weren't driving the narrative in the PF community. I think that's really bad in the long run.

So people don't want to support a FinCon with these kinds of attitudes and cluelessness at the top. Failing to see the problem here.

I guess I was just confused as to how his initial comment sparked this. If there is a backstory, then that makes more sense, although I still struggle with how this particular comment turned into some sort of match that lifted the lid off the can of worms.

[GuitarStv]

When there are country-wide protests taking place related to common place police brutality (and the structural near impossibility of finding justice when a police officer steps out of line), publicly telling people that you are happy to be safe in your rich person enclave and that the media is hyping up the problem . . . well, that seems to have been viewed as pretty tone deaf by a great many people.

Maybe those who are having trouble understanding what was wrong with the tweet are a little out of touch with most?

[mathlete]

I guess I was just confused as to how his initial comment sparked this. If there is a backstory, then that makes more sense, although I still struggle with how this particular comment turned into some sort of match that lifted the lid off the can of worms.

Not sure why the commentary about how good his life is compared with the news on TV was the tipping point, but he also expressed that he thought the news was "why everything was so bad." So this is in the midst of a deadly pandemic that has put many people out of work, and civil unrest as a reaction to hundreds of years of systemic oppression and wealth theft against black people.

To look at your wonderful life, and then look at the news coverage, and to determine that the news is to blame, and not underlying problems that you're simply too lucky to have experienced... that's an astounding level of ignorance. Such a person probably shouldn't be the face of a movement that is ostensibly about elevating people financially. 

And now he's not. He stepped down and issued statements about inclusion and commitment to do better. This is good for his detractors because it shows that he and FinCon are listening. It's good for him, because he's the founder of FinCon, and this probably helps preserve the value of the business he built.

[mathlete]

To me, this isn't about snowflakes being offended. Having an attitude like this makes you legitimately bad at your job as a personal finance guru. If you look at things like achievement gaps and disparity in prison sentencing and the dramatic impact that has on wealth building and think it's just all media hype, you're making yourself worse at your job as PF expert.

I feel the same way about MMM when he cracks jokes minimizing the impact of privilege or brags about his "low information diet". Cool. You're rich and white and problems that affect other people will never affect you. That's all well and good, but don't be surprised if some people think that makes your voice less relevant when it comes to personal finance matters.

I know that at some point, this all became about generating ad impressions, getting clicks, maximizing CPM, increasing engagement, juicing credit card referrals, and other fancy words for making big money off of repackaging "spend less than you make and invest the difference", but if you take the tack that all of this is supposed to be in service of personal finance, it makes a lot more sense.

[OtherJen]

When there are country-wide protests taking place related to common place police brutality (and the structural near impossibility of finding justice when a police officer steps out of line), publicly telling people that you are happy to be safe in your rich person enclave and that the media is hyping up the problem . . . well, that seems to have been viewed as pretty tone deaf by a great many people.

Maybe those who are having trouble understanding what was wrong with the tweet are a little out of touch with most?

That was also my take on it. After the responses to his first tweet, he could have acknowledged that he was lucky and grateful and that ending his post with "Almost makes me feel guilty. Almost." appeared very smug and off-putting, given that millions of people were worried about making rent due to global economic circumstances that are largely out of their control or about having police and military fire at them for protesting peacefully and legally in their own neighborhoods. He could have apologized for being tone-deaf, welcomed dialogue, and sparked some interesting and thoughtful conversations, given his huge platform in the field. Instead, he doubled down and blamed the media.

It was an irresponsible and immature decision and action on the part of someone in a high executive position. Let's not kid ourselves: he chose his responses. I'm guessing he's a pretty strong advocate of personal responsibility. Hopefully his subsequent actions will salvage what appears to be a lot of good associated with FinCon.

[StarBright]

I don't see what's remotely controversial about stating that you are grateful to live in the suburbs and thus be somewhat removed from the chaos that has engulfed our world over the past three months.  The Atlantic just did a 2,500 word article about exactly that -- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/pandemic-suburbs-are-best/613300/

That makes the suburbs aspirational, despite all their downsides. The European-modernist retort to their appeal, about which many domestic urbanists fantasize, is more collectivism. But the American response redoubles its bet on individualism: to socialize the ability to hunker down safely and comfortably, whether from plague or any other threat. There are plenty of them, after all. When pandemic worries got sidelined for protests over antiblack police violence, some reformers called on governments to defund the police and reinvest their budgets elsewhere. The New York City Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who supports the idea, was asked how such a society might work. Her answer: “It looks like a suburb.”

I can't tell you how many times I'm glad to live (relatively speaking) in the middle of nowhere, and that has been the truth ten-fold in the past three months.

I guess I'm supposed to keep that truth in the closet so as to not offend people for, who knows, an indefinite period of time.

So part of the issue is that Taylor wasn't talking about about being happy to be away from cities because of COVID-19 - he was apparently specifically talking about the BLM protests. He also started the issue by saying something about the news being the reason everything is so bad. I honestly think it was more than tone-deaf, it was dismissive.

I thought this WaPo piece was pretty good about the PF world's issues with race:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/12/personal-finance-industry-must-address-racial-discrimination/

I thought it was fairly even handed regarding FinCon and did a nice job of pointing out how more diversity in the PF world might actually help more people. 

[Tyler durden]

Can either of you describe exactly the outcome you would have preferred in the case we're discussing?


I re read the tweet. I would choose not to destroy a mans career over it.

You would destroy it or something in between ?

I'm not sure that this response really answered what I was looking for.

The only individual responsible for 'destroying a man's career' that I'm seeing in this case was the man himself.  He chose to have a job where his career depended on public image . . . and then he personally took actions to damage his own public image.  Any loss that resulted was directly in response to what he did.  His 'career' isn't really destroyed either . . . he will just need to take steps over a period of time to slowly rebuild the reputation that he took steps to damage.  No individual was responsible for destroying this man's 'career', it was the collective free action of the public in response to the comments he made.

I guess I was wondering how you would suggest going about achieving the outcome that you desire for this case (no destruction of 'career').  Should the public be prevented in some way from responding the way that they want to when confronted with behavior they don't like?  Should it be required that when a person who does something publicly stupid, others are forced to forgive this person (and if so, how do you propose enforcement of this 'forgiveness')?

My view - responsibility for your personal actions ultimately has to rely with you.  If my career precariously depended on the things I posted online I would either:
- change careers
- be extremely careful not to post controversial/offensive things online
Getting upset that other people aren't giving me a second chance after I choose to do something stupid that damages my online persona/credibility and therefore impacts my chosen 'career' seems to be a total abdication of personal responsibility.  It's weird to me to get upset that there are consequences for actions.

How do we achieve my desired outcome ? Good question. It seems to be a rot in our culture that is growing and getting worse. So how do we cancel cancel culture ?

I have no idea.

I see a harmless tweet and a mans career wrecked. I don’t like it.

Ah.  I see where your confusion might be coming from then.  The tweet wasn't harmless (nor did it stand in isolation) according to his clientele.  But maybe if you look at it from a different angle:

Let's say he was a carpenter who relied on word of mouth . . . and then he built a house that collapsed.  Would you be arguing that it's unfair that people are destroying his career because they're not hiring him to build more houses?

In the case we're discussing the man's 'career' was to separate people from money by offering a comforting public face and some advice they could get for free from almost anywhere else.  He damaged his primary sales tool (his comforting public face) and people don't want to hire him any more.

Is this really a problem at all?  It seems like a pretty natural progression to me.

My fix ? Raise my kids to not act this way and hope others do the same. Which is really no fix at all.

You are raising your children not to act upon the way that they feel based on what they observe?  That is likely to be a difficult task!

Do you see this as a good thing that we should hope to see more of ?  Is this outcome one you desired ?

People are now, and have always been responsible for their own public statements.  Am I happy that the man lost his 'career'?  His career depended on the good-will of the public, which he lost by saying stuff that angered his clientele.  Did I desire this?  No.  My previous post mentioned what I think he should have done to prevent this from happening.

Harmless is subjective I can give you that. The article states hundreds of his members decried him as racist. Is that the low bar we’ve set for racists ?

Yes I raise my kids not to act solely  upon how the feel. If some kid breaks a toy of theirs and my 5 year old wants to hit them, our family teaches not to act on what they feel right then.


People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

[mathlete]

Harmless is subjective I can give you that. The article states hundreds of his members decried him as racist. Is that the low bar we’ve set for racists ?

Did this ever get sourced? I saw a lot of tweets referenced in that article. Nothing that called him a racist though.

People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

It seems like you're using "offended" to cover a wide range of feelings here. I don't care about George Washington statues one way or another, but my read on that is as follows.

George Washington is an American Icon. He's held in high regard. People will appeal to the founding fathers all the time when making legal or moral arguments. The truth is that black people were subhuman to George Washington and they did not figure into the nation that he and the other founding fathers dreamt up. They were not included in the "all men" who were apparently created equal.

It is not the statue itself that is offensive. Nor is it recognizing that Washington played a huge role in how we got to where we are now. It's the constant appeal to 300 year old dead guys as if their ideas have any relevance whatsoever to the America of today. Washington owned slaves. Jefferson raped them. But some people insist on weighing their grievances about tea taxes or whatever, as more relevant that grievances of Black Americans, most of whom got no stake in what was won in the American Revolution.

People who want the statues gone aren't offended by them. They just want to turn the page.

[PDXTabs]

In general it strikes me as a great deal of irrational celebrity worship as opposed to an efficient source of learning, and spending money on something that's rather unproductive in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, but so is paying to have lunch with Warren Buffett.

[boy_bye]

People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

it's "wrong" for black people to not want to have to look at a statue of a man who walked around with their ancestors' teeth in his mouth? to maybe not have to be reminded every moment of every day that this country was founded on the stolen lives and labor of their great grandparents and we still celebrate that like it's the greatest thing ever?

(also, tyler durden was not created to give you someone to look up to. tyler durden is a caricature of idiotic toxic masculinity. the more you know!)

[Tyler durden]

Harmless is subjective I can give you that. The article states hundreds of his members decried him as racist. Is that the low bar we’ve set for racists ?

Did this ever get sourced? I saw a lot of tweets referenced in that article. Nothing that called him a racist though.

People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

It seems like you're using "offended" to cover a wide range of feelings here. I don't care about George Washington statues one way or another, but my read on that is as follows.

George Washington is an American Icon. He's held in high regard. People will appeal to the founding fathers all the time when making legal or moral arguments. The truth is that black people were subhuman to George Washington and they did not figure into the nation that he and the other founding fathers dreamt up. They were not included in the "all men" who were apparently created equal.

It is not the statue itself that is offensive. Nor is it recognizing that Washington played a huge role in how we got to where we are now. It's the constant appeal to 300 year old dead guys as if their ideas have any relevance whatsoever to the America of today. Washington owned slaves. Jefferson raped them. But some people insist on weighing their grievances about tea taxes or whatever, as more relevant that grievances of Black Americans, most of whom got no stake in what was won in the American Revolution.

People who want the statues gone aren't offended by them. They just want to turn the page.

So I didn’t go check Twitter feeds I just read the article. Worth double checking though. But it seems extreme right ? Insensitive- ok I guess. Racist ? Good god how out of touch am I.

The statue thing was just something I saw in the news recently and felt it played into the general topic of cancel culture. I mean per this line of thinking around ripping statues down to turn the page where does it end? Are we allowed to have a history or do we just memory hole that like in 1984? Hi No one is celebrating Washington for being a slave owner but as a founding father. We don’t celebrate MLK because he witnessed a rape and laughed about it ? We celebrate him for his activism.  Maybe. Maybe when we cancel his holiday I’ll start to take any of this cancel nonsense seriously

[mathlete]

it's "wrong" for black people to not want to have to look at a statue of a man who walked around with their ancestors' teeth in his mouth? to maybe not have to be reminded every moment of every day that this country was founded on the stolen lives and labor of their great grandparents and we still celebrate that like it's the greatest thing ever?

(also, tyler durden was not created to give you someone to look up to. tyler durden is a caricature of idiotic toxic masculinity. the more you know!)

It's not just seeing the statue either. I think a vast majority of people recognize and accept that history is filled with horrifically flawed people. I think it's important for everyone to study history and respect what the historical figures did within the context of their time.

But how much history do you learn from a few dozen statues of Washington, hundreds of buildings with his name on it, and thousands of streets named after him? The only association that really gets made there is, "Washington good."

I think monuments to flawed people are fine. But at a certain point, we should examine how it affects discourse. Does all this Washington worship increase the amount of inappropriate appeals to a 300 year old vision of a this country that just isn't that relevant? Maybe.

The argument is much easier to make against confederate monuments. Many of them were erected post-Jim Crow as a legal way to soft segregate and promote revisionist history. It worked, and we live that reality every day.

[Tyler durden]

People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

it's "wrong" for black people to not want to have to look at a statue of a man who walked around with their ancestors' teeth in his mouth? to maybe not have to be reminded every moment of every day that this country was founded on the stolen lives and labor of their great grandparents and we still celebrate that like it's the greatest thing ever?

(also, tyler durden was not created to give you someone to look up to. tyler durden is a caricature of idiotic toxic masculinity. the more you know!)

I’ll take all their $1 bills. That will help me on my path to financial independence! Lol

Yes - it’s wrong.

[mathlete]

So I didn’t go check Twitter feeds I just read the article. Worth double checking though. But it seems extreme right ? Insensitive- ok I guess. Racist ? Good god how out of touch am I.

Okay, so to be perfectly clear, I consider the author of the Medium piece to be an extremely unreliable narrator and I don't trust her not to make up things outright, or exaggerate numbers or the overall situation until we get to hundreds of people calling this guy a racist. Is anyone even doing that in this thread?

This guy made some tone deaf comments that would probably pass unnoticed if he were in a room with a bunch of other 40 something white guys who took a similar path to wealth. That room is a lot like what the PF community and FIRE in particularly used to look like. That's changing. He should change along with it if he keeps wanting to profit off of it. The system is working.

[maizefolk]

This sounds a lot like what I've seen happen in real time to several folks here in academia. I definitely have lost sleep over what will happen if I say the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, or the right thing in the right way but on the wrong day.*

My personal latest was making the decision not to cancel a talk that had been scheduled months in advance, in a foreign country, when over a 48 hour period right beforehand #ShutdownSTEM started trending and in those last two days I was getting more and more e-mails about scientific societies/departments/journals shutting their websites down on short notice. I'm still a little worried that someday that decision to honor a preexisting obligation will come back to haunt me, perhaps as part of a deep dive into my record in the future to find confirmatory evidence for some future poorly selected tweet or spoken comment.

Long way to say that this article reflects my own lived experience in my particular little corner of the USA. Until you've lived with the thought that it might be your name that twitter calls next, I don't think people understand quite how chilling an experience it can be. And to be clear I'm not playing oppression olympics here. Plenty of other people have it far worse for all sorts of reasons.

But still I don't think this is any way to run a society.

This is where I insert my disclaimer that I voted for Kerry, Obama, and even Clinton. I was too young to vote for Gore. When Obama was elected in '08 I was quite literally celebrating in the streets and still have video of that twelve years later that makes me smile. In 2020 I will vote for Biden and, while he's not the candidate I backed in the primary, I won't make any pretense of it being a hard choice for me personally. When I've brought up how scary this sort of thing can be and that I think it's a bad idea in other settings, people have told me they don't want my support. I'm still going to vote for him anyway.

*Saw people tagging a woman's employing university about how bad she was and how her apology and deletion of the tweet wasn't enough/didn't count. Took a bit of digging to find out her sin was tweeting about the unfair standards applied to women in academia but doing so on June 19th (Juneteenth). She'd apparently compounded that sin by blocking several of the accounts -- of BIPOCs -- who were telling her that her original tweet was not acceptable before deleting the tweet and apologizing.

[GuitarStv]

Harmless is subjective I can give you that. The article states hundreds of his members decried him as racist. Is that the low bar we’ve set for racists ?

I don't believe that the tweet displayed in the article is evidence of racism.  Likewise I also don't believe the writer of the article (who has personal ties to the guy she's writing about, and appears to be very far from impartial or reliable) when she says that hundreds of his members decried his as racist.

Yes I raise my kids not to act solely  upon how the feel. If some kid breaks a toy of theirs and my 5 year old wants to hit them, our family teaches not to act on what they feel right then.

Sure, that's very sensible.  But a little beside the point.  Nobody hit or threatened the guy in this article.  They just stopped giving him their money and support.  If your kid feels that another person isn't very nice, or a good person . . . do you encourage them to hand over their money?

People being offended doesn’t mean they should be offended. You can be wrong on that. People seemed offended by statues of George Washington so they are tearing them down. They are wrong to be offended and wrong in their actions.

For his many virtues as a political leader, Washington certainly had some faults.

George Washington was an active slave owner for his entire adult life, even continuing to own slaves of his own while telling everyone how terrible and unconscionable slavery is.  Freeing people was never as important to him as making money from the slaves he purchased and owned.  He is recorded as having had his slaves whipped on multiple occasions for infractions.  When they died, he buried the slaves in unmarked graves.  He eventually freed his slaves - but not until he had died first.

You don't see any reason that someone might find a statue celebrating this man a teeny bit offensive?

[boy_bye]

"George Washington probably gave his inaugural speech with teeth that were from people who were enslaved," Gehred told Live Science. "It's grim."

https://www.livescience.com/61919-george-washington-teeth-not-wood.html

Does that mean that we shouldn't learn about or appreciate the contributions of George Washington? Of course not. But we only teach our kids half the story, and we celebrate it like the other half didn't even happen. Both his contributions and his slave owning are real. Both must be told.

[mathlete]

This sounds a lot like what I've seen happen in real time to several folks here in academia. I definitely have lost sleep over what will happen if I say the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, or the right thing in the right way but on the wrong day.*

My personal latest was making the decision not to cancel a talk that had been scheduled months in advance, in a foreign country, when over a 48 hour period right beforehand #ShutdownSTEM started trending and in those last two days I was getting more and more e-mails about scientific societies/departments/journals shutting their websites down on short notice. I'm still a little worried that someday that decision to honor a preexisting obligation will come back to haunt me, perhaps as part of a deep dive into my record in the future to find confirmatory evidence for some future poorly selected tweet or spoken comment.

Long way to say that this article reflects my own lived experience in my particular little corner of the USA. Until you've lived with the thought that it might be your name that twitter calls next, I don't think people understand quite how chilling an experience it can be. And to be clear I'm not playing oppression olympics here. Plenty of other people have it far worse for all sorts of reasons.

But still I don't think this is any way to run a society.

This is where I insert my disclaimer that I voted for Kerry, Obama, and even Clinton. I was too young to vote for Gore. When Obama was elected in '08 I was quite literally celebrating in the streets and still have video of that twelve years later that makes me smile. In 2020 I will vote for Biden and, while he's not the candidate I backed in the primary, I won't make any pretense of it being a hard choice for me personally. When I've brought up how scary this sort of thing can be and that I think it's a bad idea in other settings, people have told me they don't want my support. I'm still going to vote for him anyway.

*Saw people tagging a woman's employing university about how bad she was and how her apology and deletion of the tweet wasn't enough/didn't count. Took a bit of digging to find out her sin was tweeting about the unfair standards applied to women in academia but doing so on June 19th (Juneteenth). She'd apparently compounded that sin by blocking several of the accounts -- of BIPOCs -- who were telling her that her original tweet was not acceptable before deleting the tweet and apologizing.

How do we run society? Guys who think much in the way that Philip Taylor appears to have dominated the conversation around personal responsibility for as long as I've been alive, and from what I can tell, the results have been pretty disastrous. That doesn't make him a bad person, but what's the serious offense here? People loudly saying on Twitter that they no longer want to participate in the conversation that he is the administrator of?