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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)

#41

Post by gizmo686 »

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…

The ISS never had a gun; it stayed in the Soyuz.

Supposedly, the gun has not been included in recent missions.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/h...

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

#42

Post by pizza »

asveikau wrote: post #40
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 bunc…

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in 1947 - when Nazism, Stalinism, Fat Boy & Little Man, and the advent of popular culture were still in short-term memory) devotes a good amount of analysis to how - in spite of society's tendency to espouse 'progress eliminates regression' - society is not monotonically increasing.

> "The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.”

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

#43

Post by freeflight »

A really interesting read and imho it's quite relevant to our current times. This is the current political climate in a nutshell:

> Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude “requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any ‘establishment’” and “can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one,” Perry wrote. “The tendency … is toward paranoia.”

Reading parts of the manifesto, rambling on about "leftists/collectivists/socialists", also reminded me about rather recent "alt-right" arguments. I guess we humans just prefer our realities to be neatly dualistic or else we might be wasting too much energy actually "thinking" about stuff, what a hassle that would be!

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

#44

Post by sooheon »

bitexploder wrote: post #36
jonahx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

I think you missed the point of the parent. The idea of an atom bomb did not enter Truman's mind out of the blue sky. People create technology, and that in turn influences decisions. The types of technology we surround ourselves will in turn shape us, and the further decisions we make. It's more intertwined than a simple "force multiplier", it's also a force director in a way.

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

#45

Post by pizza »

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…

Laws are like coupons: you can redeem them, but no coupon redeems itself without a redeemer.

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

#46

Post by jonahx »

bitexploder wrote: post #36
jonahx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

The point is easier to see with things like the printing press, the personal computer, cell phones, or even facebook...

> 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.

The collective will of human beings is helpless in the face of such technologies. To act as if we have control over the changes they produce deeply misunderstands the situation.

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

#47

Post by sooheon »

wybiral wrote: post #27
tpeo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Kaczynski's concerns over technology are different from those raised by your teacher. The issue isn't so much that technology can be put to bad uses, but that it changes how people engage with the world. Analogical example: people might lie over the internet, but whether the internet has made relationships shallower is a different issue.

The world isn't static though. Evolution and environmental changes over time will cause people to change how they engage with the changing world. This has happened long before human technology.

Scale and velocity can create entirely different qualities. Change has always been with us, just not quite like this.

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

#48

Post by CalChris »

setr wrote: post #37
CalChris wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I explained why I thought he wasn't worth reading. If you think he is then you should explain that.

As I said, I read a biographical piece in the NYTimes that mentioned his favorite book. Conrad is a great writer and that had me intrigued. But then after reading it, it didn't raise my opinion of him.

As for his existence, the guy sent bombs in the mail to innocent people. Fuck him.

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

#49

Post by pizza »

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…

If we establish these ground-rules:

1. [proof of concept] the inventor is responsible for the invention's (initial) appearance, but not for any other person's epiphanies regarding possible use-cases {in HN speak: execution(opportunity) >= execution(invention) >> imagination(invention) > imagination(execution(opportunity)) }

2. [proof that one can rely upon proof of concept] the user is responsible for the opportunity in which the invention is used

3. [proof of concept evolves into paradigm] society becomes aware of opportunities in which established inventions have typically been used or hypothetical (realistic?) situations in which their use would be significant

..it may become easier to discriminate the components of responsibility.

[does responsibility obey the distribute property? Does it obey association? (Could it ever be abelian???), etc...]

Furthermore... I can understand people making choices affect the choices that others can make as a lemma - but I don't particularly believe the TOOLS that people decide upon ARE EXACTLY those 'choice-deltas' - without a huge deviation from ordinary definition of technology ( which I think is not without rationale).

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

#50

Post by CalChris »

tomcam wrote: post #34
smallnamespace wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Besides Trump?
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