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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#601

Post by paulpauper »

drones wrote: post #43
mihaic wrote: post #25

The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye. After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.

There are way more Ted K's running around today - it's just that you don't need to kill people to get heard anymore. Nowadays the spectacle of ruining your own life is enough to get noticed. Anyone with an internet connection today has access to world stage provided they are interesting enough. Back then you'd need to catch the eye of a producer for a mainstream news broadcast to get any coverage. Now you can just fi…

the odds are way worse than that. think how many emails his producer gets from people wanting to be on his show

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#602

Post by emodendroket »

pixl97 wrote: post #589
emodendroket wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.

This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures. Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all de…

I mean, yes, if I sincerely believed in his project maybe I’d think that way.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#603

Post by gverrilla »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429
bkohlmann wrote: post #352

One of my good friend’s dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski when she was a young teenager. A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him. And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for. Kaczynski May have said some intere…

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss. I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". 15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started b…

what a stupid endeavor.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#604

Post by sam2426679 »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429
bkohlmann wrote: post #352

One of my good friend’s dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski when she was a young teenager. A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him. And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for. Kaczynski May have said some intere…

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss. I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". 15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started b…

> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly. The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.'

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

(He was 17 years old during his second year at Harvard).

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#605

Post by edgyquant »

yeck wrote: post #390
j9461701 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term…

That is post-agricultural revolution humanity. Sure it is ancient by the standards of an individual, but it is only a relatively recent and small part of the more than 100 thousand years of human pre-history.

Okay but humans did this in a ton of environments pre-agriculture. The Amazon was a large grassland with patches of forest that tribal peoples shaped into a giant rainforest over time. This is thought to be the case with tons of places in the old world as well. Humans have been doing mega engineering type stuff for at least 20-30000 years

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#606

Post by emodendroket »

onethought wrote: post #595
pixl97 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures. Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all de…

Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths. Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.

Anyway, if we want to apply utilitarian reasoning, taking someone’s ideas seriously simply because he garnered attention through random killings would seem to encourage more people to do violence for various different causes.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#607

Post by themaninthedark »

sam2426679 wrote: post #604
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss. I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". 15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started b…

> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system. 'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing ps…

I find it very interesting that the news covering his life neglects to mention the MKULTRA part...

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#608

Post by [deleted] »

crhulls wrote: post #31

His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

[deleted]

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#609

Post by nine_k »

jaredhallen wrote: post #591
nine_k wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you; this elucidates a lot. So it boils down to a question: would you exchange the life of a lone top predator (in a forest with a firearm) to any other kind of life? For some people the answer would be in favor of the top predator life. To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone. After this, killing becomes mere killing (predators do not "murder"), and the whole idea of destroying everyo…

I think characterizing the contempt for technology only in terms of the advantage it conveys to the "adversary" is kind of an incomplete analysis. There are true and valid reasons outside that. I'm in the camp that it (technology) is a double edged sword. It's hard to argue with the improvements in medicine, reduction in basic suffering, etc. But it wreaks a lot of havoc in its own right. The question is whether the…

Is there anything in the world which is not a double-edged sword, something completely devoid of downsides? AFAIK only certain transcendent entities are declared to have this property.
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