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Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

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

#61

Post by jamesrcole »

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…

It runs the other way, too. Technology that is seen as for "bad" purposes can be used for "good". Like if some IT technology was developed for a perceived bad, like military uses or for pure profit, it may also be used for perceived good.

Or more subtly, technology developed for perceived "useless" ends can be used for good. Eg tech advances made for gaming that help push forwards the state of the art.

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

#62

Post by dmix »

fusiongyro wrote: post #58
dmix wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a links to alt right writings and thought leaders that push forward this view? I hear endlessly about this alt right ideology from the left but I can't seem to find a single person other than a few clearly fringe white nationalists who use this label. I try to follow both left and right, anarchist and libertarian groups, on Twitter and elsewhere quite closely and I've been struggling to connect the breath…

It doesn't seem to you like the right is increasingly reliant on shadowy conspiracies to explain events? I haven't heard the phrase "false flag operation" come up except from my infowars friends. A Republican chairman from my state said the violence in Charlottesville was caused by "evil Soros money," which seems to imply a conspiracy to me. Doesn't the whole "fake news" thing strike you as an attempt on the part of…

Soros is merely the rights version of how the Koch brothers are behind everything to the left. Sorry I'm struggling to take this as anything new or special with the right in the Fox news/CNN world of US politics.

But as I said we're in a new era of extreme political tribalism.

What disappointments me is that so many smart people on the left think they are engaging in 'resistance' when they are largely just fueling further tribalism by going deeper down their sides rabbit hole - instead of engaging in rational discourse, focusing on party output instead of tribal wins, and rejecting FUD. I hold the right to a lower standard as I believe most of them are doing it for emotional gratification of trolling the left rather than pursuing some righteous politicial objective, but that still largely creates the same results.

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

#63

Post by Iv »

gizmo686 wrote: post #41
Iv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

For the intent of drama, it can be considered accessible from the ISS :-)

Thanks for the link, that's good to know, no more weapons in space!

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

#64

Post by fusiongyro »

dmix wrote: post #62
fusiongyro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem to you like the right is increasingly reliant on shadowy conspiracies to explain events? I haven't heard the phrase "false flag operation" come up except from my infowars friends. A Republican chairman from my state said the violence in Charlottesville was caused by "evil Soros money," which seems to imply a conspiracy to me. Doesn't the whole "fake news" thing strike you as an attempt on the part of…

Soros is merely the rights version of how the Koch brothers are behind everything to the left. Sorry I'm struggling to take this as anything new or special with the right in the Fox news/CNN world of US politics. But as I said we're in a new era of extreme political tribalism. What disappointments me is that so many smart people on the left think they are engaging in 'resistance' when they are largely just fueling fu…

That's a fair point about the Koch brothers. I can't disagree with what you're saying here.

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

#65

Post by kaeluka »

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…

You should send a mail to that teacher and tell them how this lesson stuck with you, if you haven't :-)

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

#66

Post by smallnamespace »

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.

Well, I do think that honest people can disagree in good faith over complicated topics, like how to run the economy, or how much of a problem global warming is, or what to do about illegal immigration.

So how about some simple, unambiguous fact that should submit to easy verification?

As of late last year, about 42% of Republicans polled disagreed with the assertion that Obama was born in the US, while only 27% of Republicans agreed [1]. Plus the fact that our current sitting president was instrumental in formulating and then popularizing this lie.

I submit this to you as a good example of 'know-nothingism' -- if there's some piece of information that challenges your world view, then you will do your damned best to know nothing about it.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-persiste...

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

#67

Post by CalChris »

setr wrote: post #57
CalChris wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I think I explained why I thought he wasn't worth reading Well no, you said why he wasn't worth reading, and then made claims about him and his work ("There was nothing to the man...") My question is why you went out of your way to ignore the available first-hand sources, and preferred second-hand, and indirect, sources to judge his writing. Why would you read the book he likes, but not what he actually wrote, befor…

I did. That's true. I said that someone who murders to call attention to his writing is not worth reading. Moreover, that there is nothing to the man. When Hinkley shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, I don't think she was impressed.

Now as to your question, I didn't judge his writing; I judged him. Terrorists who murder for acclaim aren't necessarily the most insightful writers cuz like if they were, they wouldn't need to murder.

It's apparent that you somehow think there is value or merit to his writing and by extension, him. Then that would be your task, to show that. I don't need to prove the negative. You need to show this great idea that Mr. Kaczynski proffered.

Cuz like I'm not seeing it.

BTW, if by the book you meant Conrad's The Secret Agent, no I didn't know the book. Conrad is a great writer but this isn't his best which to me would be Heart of Darkness. It's still worth a read, irrespective of Kaczynski.

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

#68

Post by tlb »

FooHentai wrote: post #19
tlb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article paraphrases Ellul criticizing the modern world, "mankind no longer saw technology as merely a tool but now pursued its advancement as an end in itself. Society served technology, not vice versa. Individuals were valued only insofar as they served this end." That was a major influence on Kaczynski. When you say it's tragic that he didn't end up contributing to mathematics, you're judging his life by the va…

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata! What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people, it is the people, it is the people! The advancement of technology and furthering of knowledge is a noble endeavor, but only in pursuit of a higher goal. Advanced technology not used, or great knowledge never applied, is of no value. It is only with a higher intention for the use of these thi…

If you think that overall, knowledge improve people's lives, then you can take either position and act the same way. If you think that knowledge overall hurts people, then you have to decide (and you should probably go with the people.)

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

#69

Post by anotherbrownguy »

The brainwashing experiment is being done at a much larger scale by the American left and the globalists (i.e. 1. anything that makes human life better in any way is doing some harm to something... it's usually environment or natural way of things or anything else they can come up with, 2. morality is relative, 3. everyone is "equal" etc.). As a result, the world is deeply divided in this regard. We are at a brink of a major world war and it seems unavoidable.

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

#70

Post by mseebach »

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…

Guns and nuclear bombs are still "just" force multipliers, but they are multipliers of predominantly or even overwhelmingly negative forces.

The problem isn't that trivial conclusion in isolation, it's what happens in a multi-actor game, where the other players have significantly higher badness than yourself. Despicable as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, had Hitler or Stalin gotten the bomb first, there's a substantial risk of a much, much worse outcome. Stalin did get the bomb, but MAD ensured that he never used it. That is also a force multiplier.

Same dilemma for guns: could you remove all guns from everyone at once (except cops and perhaps carefully trained, background-checked, mentally sound, and clean-criminal-record holding citizens, and without going door-to-door Iraqi-counter-insurgency-style), it would probably be quite simple to get a clear majority for doing it. But you can't, and so removing the guns means removing them from people for whom they represent the least of a negatively multiplied force. Hence the slogan, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

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