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Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

theatlantic.com

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Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#31

Post by Iv »

justboxing wrote: post #16

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

> You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things.

Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you.

Internationally we have a lack of laws and a lack of enforcement, therefore we had only limited success at preventing nuclear proliferation or chemical/bio weapons uses but the will is there and successes do exist.

Both Antarctica and outer space are military-weapons-free (they do have a valid excuse for that handgun on the ISS)

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#32

Post by jonahx »

bitexploder wrote: post #23
justboxing wrote: post #16

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc. One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we s…

> people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain

Except, this isn't empirically true. It's the same argument made by the NRA ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the gun debate here, only pointing out that if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by guns.

There's something comforting about the view that "it's really just people doing these things," because it suggests we aren't responsible for our inventions and their consequences. It sidesteps the actual unfathomable complexity, which at high level is this: people are living an environment which can be changed with new technology, which will in turn cause them to behave differently in unpredictable ways.

Make no mistake: the technology causes the change.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#33

Post by cabinguy »

Steko wrote: post #20
mithunmanohar1 wrote: post #17

http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2017/08/22/545168709/f... Here is a podcast with FBI agent who played a pivotal role in solving this case.

The profiling is interesting but in this case, the FBI was irrelevant to 'solving the case', Kaczynski's brother and sister-in-law saw the manifesto in the NYT and turned him in.

The FBI made the call to publish the manifesto, hoping for this exact outcome.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#34

Post by tomcam »

smallnamespace wrote: post #18
j9461701 wrote: post #13

The article reminded me of the two cultures lecture by CP Snow, from 1959. Where Snow argued Western intellectual culture was sharply divided between the humanities and the sciences, and great harm was being done by each trying to poison and undermine the other to claim greater cultural cachet. I wonder if this played some role in Kaczynski's strange tragedy. As the article describes, he seemed to have adopted parts…

As an immigrant (from a non-Western society) who also spent youth steeped in Western literature, arts, and music, every development after WWI just seems so sad. There's the moral self-loathing (veering towards self-flagellation) of the 'social justice' class, the academic anti-truth of the relativists and the post-modernists, the equally poisonous know-nothingism of parts of the right. Western civilization still live…

Give me an example of no-nothingism on the right.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#35

Post by scarmig »

Iv wrote: post #31
justboxing wrote: post #16

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

> You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things. Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you. Internationally we have a lack of laws and a lack of enforcement, therefore we had only limited success at preventing nuclear proliferation or chemical/bio weapons uses…

> Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you

Unless it's the people doing the destroying and arresting who are flying the knife drone. In that case, they'll be celebrated as patriotic heroes and you as a terrorist deserving of death.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#36

Post by bitexploder »

jonahx wrote: post #32
bitexploder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc. One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we s…

> people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain Except, this isn't empirically true. It's the same argument made by the NRA ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the gun debate here, only pointing out that if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by…

I don't think we can unwind it so simply. The basic consequences of technology are not new. The scale and asymmetry are. It shifts power around and changes who can make decisions about what happens. Of course we are responsible for our inventions.

Oppenheimer and co. lived with the most dramatic weight of such decisions. No one solely blames the president who went ahead with dropping the bombs. It took thousands of people making a conscious effort to build and deploy the technology. In a sense we all own that to this day. But at it's heart it is and always will be driven by the choices of people. As long as we agree that our will as human beings exceeds that of technology, then it is people doing the changing, whether thru build of tech or use thereof.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#37

Post by setr »

CalChris wrote: post #6
altotrees wrote: post #3

His story is tragic. Tragic in that he was seemingly so smart even he couldn't handle it. Tragic in that people lost their lives. Tragic in the fact that we lost a mind like his and the advancements he could've brought to mathematics potentially. Sad in that he was so impacted by MK ultra. It's a truly terrible, yet captivating story. His neo-Luddism has always been of interest to me also, as one of my classes read h…

I never read any of his writings. I never thought someone who murdered to call attention to his writings would write anything worth reading. But I read a long biography of him in the NY Times after he was arrested. It said his favorite book was Conrad's The Secret Agent ; he read it 20 times. Ok, I'll read that. There's a character, the anarchist who carried a bomb with him everywhere so the police wouldn't arrest hi…

Why did you go out of your way to read his inspiration but not bother to read his actual writings

And then come to the conclusion that this was sufficient to judge his writings, and his existence

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#38

Post by watwut »

WillyOnWheels wrote: post #5

Not sure what the point of all this is. Thousands of very smart, accomplished men and women have gone through GenEd at Harvard without murdering multiple people. Personally I think Kaczynski was influenced more by his inability to get a date in his entire life.

The date thing is quite a novel interpretation. Also only 22 people went through long psychological experiment he did and afaik they were all older.

It might be surprising, but women in fact don't have civilising effect on brutes nor cure mental disease nor change peoples with philosophies (which he possibly did not had). Plenty of violent people with girlfriend in history.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#39

Post by lliamander »

altotrees wrote: post #3

His story is tragic. Tragic in that he was seemingly so smart even he couldn't handle it. Tragic in that people lost their lives. Tragic in the fact that we lost a mind like his and the advancements he could've brought to mathematics potentially. Sad in that he was so impacted by MK ultra. It's a truly terrible, yet captivating story. His neo-Luddism has always been of interest to me also, as one of my classes read h…

Although not covered in the article, it is also tragic that at a mere nine months old he had to be placed in isolation in a hospital, and was unresponsive when he returned. Who knows what kind effect that had on his long term development?

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#40

Post by asveikau »

justboxing wrote: post #16

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

> Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things,

Isn't this true of every human endeavor? It's not really that remarkable that any given action has positive outcomes X, negative outcomes Y -- this in itself is not a reason to do something nor a deterrent. Seems like you can argue for or against anything on this basis.

Hard to see it as anything other than a bunch of tautological nonsense over which real people died.

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