Autumn was busy and I did not finish any of the posts I started. I won’t do that now either, but at least I can try to soothe my guilty conscience by getting my rougher than usual thoughts out with hope of updating and polishing them later.

I expect it doesn’t take much effort to dig up words younger me wrote full of misplaced certainty and eagerness to set things right . No doubt I can still display both of these “virtues”, but I try not to and to limit the damage I use few psychological tricks such as postponing reply when possible, concentrating first on non-contentious parts when it isn’t and asking questions to help me understand how probable it is that I am wrong and what is driving my response. I’ve been compiling questions and this is what I have so far:

Do I want to believe in the result or position? Does it benefit or suit me?
You can always be wrong, but there’s better than usual chance of this when your beliefs coincide with your incentives whatever those are ^[1] .

How do I feel about a problem if I replace the group A in it with some other group B?
Do I feel or think differently about an issue if it involves a stranger instead of a friend or gays instead of women? If yes, then why? Are reasons substantial and substantiated or do they point to a prejudice?

Why am I trying to say this?
Not what I am trying to say! It’s easy to have an opinion, but I avoid voicing most of them by being sufficiently busy. So when I do want to speak up I try to understand the motives driving me since they are also the source of biases.

Is it a matter of a principle or degree?
I see this mistake most often when new technological developments are judged on assumptions that may (soon) not be true anymore, but the problem is general. When disagreeing with something I try to imagine conditions under which I wouldn’t and the likelihood of those conditions. Their likelihood not only tells me how fundamentally am I disagreeing with something, but also how likely I think it is, both of which can lead to new insight ^{[2] .}

Can I be persuaded?
I can’t be on every issue and am suspicious of those who can be. If I can come up with a realistic set of conditions that would change my view, then I have something to test it against. If I can’t, then stop since I am not having a dialog.

I don’t always run through all these questions, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who wishes I did. This unordered list is not exhaustive and I plan to add to it over time. Suggestions are also welcome.

1. Or as Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ↩
2. Example: unrealistic view of humanity makes communism and libertarianism equally absurd. ↩

Update 2: Tickets are now on sale and it is safe to say that I am not going. The opening price (which will go up after 50 sold tickets) is already too high for me and it is exactly what I was originally afraid of.

Update : I am sorry, I overreacted. As http://2014.djangocon.eu//news/ makes clear tickets will cover everything except getting there and I have full confidence they will be reasonably priced. Listed transport options for those from my neighborhood are still valid (unless somebody has better data which would be great).

I did not go to DjangoCon Europe in Warsaw this year, but I was certain I would go to the next one. Not anymore.

There is no good way of contacting organizers ^[1] and not much travel information either on the DjangoCon’s website or elsewhere. Most of what there is is in French which I don’t speak so my worries are hopefully unfounded, but what I found so far looks grim.

First transport. It is not organizer’s fault I live where I do (Ljubljana, Slovenia), but my options are plane (500+€; travel time 6 and 17 hours), train (EUR ??; travel time 14-24h in each direction) or car which would take about 9 hours in one direction and cost around 600€ total per car (180 for tolls, ~400 for fuel with hopefully free parking there).

It is really difficult to get a good idea of how much do hotels on the island cost, but judging by tripadvisor they are not cheap and in general cost 100+€ per day. Staying on the mainland can be done cheap er , but I think ferry costs at least 13€ per day so total cost will likely not be very low and you will not be around for any late events.

No idea yet about how easy it is to find suitable food if you are a vegetarian or a vegan or how much does it cost. I assume it can be worked out.

In total this looks significantly more than it did to attend EuroPython in Florence and that was FLORENCE!

I dislike criticizing efforts of others, especially when I know that involves a lot of volunteering and when I am not privy to inside knowledge and dilemmas. However as a regular conference goer it does look to me that there has been a shift happening from egalitarian accessibility of making community conferences cheap and easy enough for anyone to attend to a more stratified approach where money (or time) poor will have to do with video recordings/broadcasts while the rest will get ever flashier experience.

There is obviously a lot of value in meeting face to face (otherwise most of us would probably prefer to save the expense of it) which is why I would find this kind of development sad if it happened to major community gatherings like DjangoCon Europe. So I am hoping that it isn’t and it won’t.

1. I know there’s a Twitter account. I don’t find it a good channel for the kind of communication I want, but that is a different discussion. ↩

Like Tomaž I had to deal with a flood of comments lately, sadly mostly spam and they are simply taking too much time to clean up. I think I could catch most of them by sending whole comment to Google search, parsing response for excerpts and match for similarity.

Regretfully I don’t have time to build this and it wouldn’t scale (I’m curious why Akismet doesn’t do something like that). So following Tomaž’s research my plan is to turn off comments until botnet learns comments here don’t work and then turn them back on. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks.

Until then you will need an account to comment which anyone is free to create (for now). Sorry.