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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#751

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #748
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothetical scenario where one country is persistently dumping harmful chemical or radiological waste in a waterway on which another country relies on for drinking water seems like a pretty solid casus belli to me. I think we can all agree that Kaczynski's bombing campaign is completely and unambiguously unjustified, but I don't see the need for pearl clutching over the quoted statement.

so just to clarify, are you endorsing violence? you made clear that you personally don’t endorse teddy k (RIP) but you’re dealing in hypotheticals. hypothetically if Donald Trump poured crude oil on your mom, you might find it just to hit him. you might say you would do just that. if that’s not likely to happen to you, you’re blowing smoke. which is bad for the environment.

> so just to clarify, are you endorsing violence?

Yes, but I don't see how that's some kind of a "gotcha". I think most people endorse violence when all other options have been exhausted. If the police catches someone in the act of doing what you describe and they resist arrest, violence is likely to occur and is probably justified.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#752

Post by golemotron »

vkou wrote: post #677
matkoniecz wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It sounds like the easiest way for ideas to be killed, then, is for a few abhorrent people to champion them.

Not really. There's something called The Streisand Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ).

Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example.

It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#754

Post by jaredhallen »

goatlover wrote: post #697
jaredhallen wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are there any human groups in history which were not technological? Where do you draw the line? Where the Amish did? Earlier? Was writing bad? Architecture, math, running water, clothing, fire?

I suppose ideally you don't draw a hard line, but look at each specific technology separately. Get out your crystal ball and do your best to anticipate downstream impacts. Or at least be willing to backpedal or adjust when something doesn't work out like we thought.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#755

Post by vonnik »

I grew up in the nearest large town to Ted’s Montana hideout, Helena. A friend’s father was his early defense attorney. We shopped at the same used book store, borrowed from the same town library.

I just want to say here that lots of smart people fleeing to Montana fetishize the wilderness and vilify American society, even as they continue to depend on the latter in many ways large and small.

Their way has nothing to offer. A primitive existence barely above subsistence, and a closed future in a war they can’t win.

What’s more, despite his intellectual capacity, let’s pause for a moment to consider the arrogance, wrongheadedness and unhappiness tipping into insanity of a man who left civilization and assumed for himself the role of passing death sentences on sometimes random strangers.

He’s a more literate school shooter whose best offering is a form of nihilism.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#756

Post by bbor »

spurgu wrote: post #744
bbor wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn. B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some…

I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience , just like you're pointing out: > I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow I never said it would be faster or easier. > saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Yes!…

Thank you for the very in depth explanation! Very interesting, and you’re one of the first people on this site who has coherently presented a world view that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

I would say we fundamentally differ on basic assumptions, which I would perhaps characterize as: I think the world/universe is an inhospitable place that needs human cooperation to stave off some of the immense suffering it naturally causes, whereas you see the natural order as a fundamentally satisfying one. I guess when I say it like that it sounds like the obvious justification for primitivism, but still, your points are well received and novel to me.

The perfect expression of that is the “magical object-creation machine” and your decision that no, you would not embrace/encourage it (presumably such a thing would be far too complex to make or repair alone). Im personally thinking less about resilience than of people dying of cancer, a child without enough food, a family shivering in a harsh winter, etc.

Maybe another angle is “what is the purpose of life?” I’d say it is (at least partially) to reduce suffering in ourselves and our fellow man. I’m curious, if you have any more time - do you see your “natural balance > cooperative advancement” ethos as a better way to reach the same goal, or would you express your aim differently?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#757

Post by forgetfreeman »

happytoexplain wrote: post #659
forgetfreeman wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've done neither. I simply point out that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about a body of work without first examining it. Not sure why y'all think that's controversial.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#758

Post by lumb63 »

bbor wrote: post #599
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…

> 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,…

In future discussions, you might have better luck eliciting useful responses from people when you don’t pit them to argue against an AI, IMO. It reads to me like “I didn’t want to put in the effort to generate my own thoughts, but I expect you to: good luck!”

That aside I’ll focus on the Maslow point since I think it’s the easiest to discuss and has the most obvious carryover to a lot of the other points. Maslow tells us we have a hierarchy of needs. At the top of that is self-actualization, but we need to fulfill all the lower-level needs before we feel any need for self actualization. I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc. self-actualization is basically what Ted describes as a “surrogate activity” - a need we have made up because all our “real” needs have been met, and now we have all this spare time with which we have to do something. So we create new needs for ourselves to fill our time.

You can carry this concept, of our needs being relative to our position in life, over to a lot of the other philosophies you listed. Concepts like love, generosity, pleasure, purpose, are all relative. From a modern western perspective, generosity might be buying a friend a nice gift, cooking someone dinner, etc. Those are much smaller in magnitude than, say, sharing the limited food and resources you gathered with your tribe so that they can all survive. We today think of pleasure as sex, or achieving a goal, or seeing something that makes us happy in passing. Those probably pale in comparison to the sense of pleasure of knowing a hard day’s work allowed you to live another day in a hostile environment. We think of purpose as what we were put on this earth to do. Had we not all the resources we needed, and had to work for them, I think it’s very reasonable to expect our sense of “purpose” would change to match our capabilities.

You can even see evidence of this in modern society by comparing high and low income areas. Children from lower income areas, where their physical and emotional needs are not being met, don’t get as good of grades. Why should they care about who built the pyramids or how to work a Bunsen burner when they don’t know where dinner is coming from?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#759

Post by bbor »

avgcorrection wrote: post #723
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. Yeah, you know who already did that? The Unabomber! And instead of just keeping to himself, he eventually realized by all the development being done near him that Civilization would eventually encroach upon him and keep him out. As a politics, “choosing that life” is not sufficient beca…

Well Tbf he saw a road - not exactly “forced out”. His campaign of violence was over a decade long and I don’t think I’ve read anything about him starving or caving on his self-sufficiency ideals in the meantime. But maybe this is covered in the manifesto?

I’d say that if people who value a self-sufficient primitive existence decide they can’t coexist with me in my tech-enhanced world, my natural response is “suck it up”. The idea that they like something that a huge majority of people don’t so we all need to comply to make room for them feels selfish to the point of narcissism. It doesn’t help that, as you said, going this route today would necessitate a massive… let’s charitably say “intentional population decrease”.

Not sure if you're endorsing such views or not, but point well taken - I see how some would find self-sufficiency unsatisfying if they can’t escape all traces of the rest of society.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#760

Post by bbor »

perfmode wrote: post #673
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,…

you misunderstand inner peace. inner peace is a peace which cannot be disturbed by external circumstances. inner peace means peace even amid disease. peace even amid violence.

Fair enough! I’d say it’s “equally possible in either scenario” then.
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