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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#651

Post by beebeepka »

cambaceres wrote: post #647
lumb63 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different take on his writings than yours. Rather than thinking his solution was bad, he encouraged me to question why we “spend our days improving humanity”. What does “improving humanity” even mean? What’s the metric we are optimizing for? Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ours…

What is stopping you from moving out in the wilderness if you think it's the best way to get truly happy?

Doesn't make sense in regards to what lumb63 said. They're talking about society as a whole

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#652

Post by defrost »

Eisenstein wrote: post #632
bbor wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in. This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could. It’s possible in the same way that anything is possible, but cmon - the world is objectively less violent,…

> This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could. Can someone do this? Find a place you can live and hunt for free that isn't incredibly difficult to survive in because of its inhospitable climate or lack of resources.

It's not for everyone, but FWiW the overwhelming majority of people I went to primary school with did exactly that, as had their families since they'd walked across the world to get there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#653

Post by Roark66 »

fsckboy wrote: post #633
tptacek wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When threads about Kaczynski come up, I try to remind people that the guy attempted to take down an American Airlines jetliner. He got a bomb on board in the cargo bay designed to explode at altitude --- and it did indeed explode, caused the plane to lose pressure, and filled the cabin with smoke. There were 78 people on board that flight, and but for the skill of the pilots, Kaczynski would have murdered all of them…

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

Seriously, why do we so often see mental illness as an excuse for simple evil? As far as I know in most non-authoritarian countries if a mentally ill person commits a crime the factor that decides if they get punishment, treatment, or both is not if they are mentally ill, but if they knew what they were doing at the time was wrong. The burden of proving that is on the defense and it's not easy to do so as it should be.

Someone could say, but his mental illness made him believe he has to kill those people for the good of humankind. Firstly, how do we truly know this as true? Perhaps he just loved the feeling of power it gave him so he came up with the justification. Being an intelligent man he came up with a convincing story.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#654

Post by bbor »

glimshe wrote: post #616
bbor wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What points resonate with you? With as much sincerity as I can express, I’ve gotta ask: why aren’t you living in the woods if you think the guy who said that industrial society was a mistake “had some good points”?

If you think that Buddhist monks have some good points, do you need to go live in a remote monastery? Kaczynski's critique can make us think about the extremes of modern life; it can encourage us to step back a little and live in more harmony with nature and less so in the grind of industrial society.

So you (y’all) are focusing on some of his incidental points, not the conclusions/purpose of the manifesto. Makes sense! Thanks for taking the time to explain.

I was writing a whole thing about why I find looking for nuggets of wisdom in a work that you fundamentally find severely flawed is a waste of time, but I think it’s best dropped. “Did you find these critiques interesting” isn’t even something I could really convince somebody to change their mind on lol, given all the paragraphs in Hacker News

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#655

Post by sbuk »

themaninthedark wrote: post #607
sam2426679 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

It boggles the mind how a psychologist could have thought that the experiments were even remotely ethical. TK was an evil man, no doubt, but Henry Murray is equally as evil IMHO, and somewhat culpable for the outcome.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#656

Post by bbor »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #620
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.

With respect this is not correct. What you are describing is Ad Hominem driven by some kind of moralist knee-jerk reaction. The absurd extreme of this line of reasoning would be to refuse to acknowledge the existence of snow because Hitler mentioned in passing in a letter or a speech at some point.

A) the hitler metaphor isn’t quite right - the parent isn’t saying that all of his ideas are inherently 100% false, but rather that reading his work is wasteful and disrespectful and dangerous. (Ok well some of that’s me but I’m guessing they’d agree) In my eyes, a better metaphor would be “refuse to read mein kampf even though it has some true paragraphs about the harms of monetary inflation”. Which, by god, I hope we can all agree is the right choice!

B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#657

Post by matkoniecz »

californiadreem wrote: post #32

Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age. Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian ana…

> Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead

I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people.

I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#658

Post by jdkoeck »

fsckboy wrote: post #633
tptacek wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When threads about Kaczynski come up, I try to remind people that the guy attempted to take down an American Airlines jetliner. He got a bomb on board in the cargo bay designed to explode at altitude --- and it did indeed explode, caused the plane to lose pressure, and filled the cabin with smoke. There were 78 people on board that flight, and but for the skill of the pilots, Kaczynski would have murdered all of them…

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

He was not a terrorist because of his mental health issues, he was a terrorist because of his convictions. No excuses.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#659

Post by happytoexplain »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #645
emodendroket wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more accurate Hitler analogy would probably be to reject his racial theories out of hand since they led to the world's first industrial-scale genocide.

Rejection out of hand is bankrupt regardless of what motivation one cares to use as a hood ornament. If one can't be assed to even examine the claims in question, one certainly isn't qualified to field a critique thereof. At minimum, one should know one's enemy.

Your accusations are dramatic. It's OK to not consider this particular person's writings on the topic as required reading, or even particularly valuable, without rejecting the topic as a whole. And more subjectively, you shouldn't try to bully people into giving credence to murderers.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#660

Post by williamcotton »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #536
williamcotton wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a deep level of misunderstanding and argumentativeness that makes me think you’re trolling me… so we’re done here!

I'm not trolling you. I think you're making very broad claims about psychology that aren't supported by evidence, and I'm doing my best to understand and engage.

Ted K murdered a PR executive. That was psychopathic. He could easily have deemed a person who drives a car as worthy of death based on the same flimsy reasoning.

It doesn’t matter if we took a poll to see who a large sample of the population thought was a better person, the PR executive or a random person driving a gas guzzler, because cold blooded murder is an absolute evil.

An attempt to understand his actions based on a position of moral superiority over the PR executive is to follow the same psychopathic trajectory as Ted K.

Calmly calculating by oneself who is most worthy of death in a manner that selects a PR executive and then executing on such a plan, as a categorical imperative, is akin to open season on humanity itself.

However, the value judgement that any of us could be seen unfairly in a negative manner and therefore worthy of compassion and understanding, as a categorical imperative, is in comparison universally better and by quite a large margin.

I am engaging in moral absolutes. You and the person I originally responded to are engaging in moral relativism.

Agree to disagree?

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