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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)

#71

Post by matthewmacleod »

pizza wrote: post #42
asveikau wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dissol…

I think it would be hard to find an argument anywhere that social or cultural progress was monotonic. It almost feels like sawtooth progression is a natural law of some kind…

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

#72

Post by Simon_says »

mseebach wrote: post #70
bitexploder wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [Guns and nuclear bombs] are multipliers of predominantly or even overwhelmingly negative forces.

Whether this statement is true is not clear. The time since multiple countries have had nuclear weapons has been one of the most peaceful times in human history. You can't just look at all the times guns and bombs are used, you have to also include all the times they have been there and not used.

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

#73

Post by setr »

CalChris wrote: post #67
setr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

While I did enjoy his manifesto, I'm not particularly interested in convincing you to read it; I'm just wondering why, when your curiosity was piqued, you chose to avoid the available first-hand source, which you've answered though I don't find your reasons very compelling

But to address that:

>Terrorists who murder for acclaim aren't necessarily the most insightful writers cuz like if they were, they wouldn't need to murder.

Its hardly the case that insightful writing will naturally spread; you yourself provide an example of why it might: you know his murders had little to do with his actual arguments (if you believe his claims), but use it as a reason to not even consider the argument. More generally, a solid argument can easily be publicly ignored for reasons unrelated to it, including style, origin, author's personal traits or behavior, media lambasting, politics, etc. We hardly live in a world where reason alone is sufficient.

That he resorted to terrorism was likely an unreasonable escalation to popularize his writing is irrelevant in all ways I can figure to whether or not he his ideas were insightful, or better yet, interesting. And given the history behind the document (which apparently grabbed your interest too), it seems unreasonable to me to expect nothing of value from it. It might be wrong, but its clearly going to be interesting.

And pretending the bombings never happened, would you have read it?

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

#74

Post by rjsw »

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…

There was a gun on the Almaz [0] space station.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz

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

#75

Post by mseebach »

Simon_says wrote: post #72
mseebach wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [Guns and nuclear bombs] are multipliers of predominantly or even overwhelmingly negative forces. Whether this statement is true is not clear. The time since multiple countries have had nuclear weapons has been one of the most peaceful times in human history. You can't just look at all the times guns and bombs are used, you have to also include all the times they have been there and not used.

Yeah, that's the distinction I'm trying to make. Using a gun/bomb is overwhelmingly negative, having one is significantly more ambiguous.

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

#76

Post by taejo »

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.

"People in this country have had enough of experts" -- Michael Gove, in 2016, then Secretary of Justice in the Conservative Party government of the UK

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

#77

Post by dzdt »

Chiba-City wrote: post #15

Wittgenstein gave away his fortune. He left academia and taught kids math. Never equate trinket lusts and synthetics peddlers with sciences. Kaczynski was specifically a young victim of wholly inferior bad men playing with superior men who should be named, denigrated and brutally punished if still breathing. Tit-for-tat for children of bad men is counseled by Harvard game theorists like Thomas Schelling. These are mi…

This comment hints at either interesting thoughts or craziness, but is about four times too short for me to tell which.

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

#78

Post by pvg »

tray5 wrote: post #55
pvg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." Lots of mentally ill people defend what they believe in very vigorously.

Not what I'm saying, I'm saying it is well thought out and has reasoned arguments. Not just that he believes in it a lot.

Really? You're one of few people who think that. The 'manifesto' hits the crazy right off the bat and sticks to it for 35k words.

"One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism [...] When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like [...] Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)

[...] By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self- hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism."

You can get stuff of this quality by the shovelful from your typical bad subreddit, although usually not by one person all at once.

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

#80

Post by dgut »

pizza wrote: post #42
asveikau wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dissol…

I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g:

> What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance.

To quote Hume:

> If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

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