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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#781

Post by asveikau »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #704
asveikau wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kaczynski May have said some interesting things That take is strange to me. He reminds me a lot of people I've been close to who suffered mental illness. He didn't want to be considered mentally ill, and his apologists don't like it either, and further, many who focus on his victims and crimes don't like it. But for me, that's the major story about him. It was clear to me the first time i tried to read the manifest…

I'm sure someone else has posted this but... rather than a mentally ill screed I'd say it's a pretty lucid diagnosis of the last 30 years: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-o...

So this allegory tells us that humanity faces existential threats and that the answer is violence towards anybody who want to focus on another problem beyond his pet project. I read it as pretty deranged and unjustly angry. Along with the other articles on that site by Kaczynski.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#782

Post by avgcorrection »

shrimpx wrote: post #779
avgcorrection wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the hum…

I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and yo…

> Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups.

Ask an anthropologist if this is true.

You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.

I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#783

Post by 9991 »

valval wrote: post #771
9991 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite a reference for that?

Can you cite a reference for the morality between good and evil?

No. Good and evil are labels people attach to the emotions people feel about others' actions. They have surprisingly little predictive power on the hows and whys of behavior.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#784

Post by shrimpx »

avgcorrection wrote: post #782
shrimpx wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and yo…

> Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. Ask an anthropologist if this is true. You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards. I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (…

> I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes.

This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.

My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#785

Post by nine_k »

natmaka wrote: post #625
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…

> To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone Tigers live lonely and avoid fighting other tigers to death (even the extreme case of males both courting the same female rarely leads to such an issue), probably in order to preserve their genus. Lions live in 'societies' (well-structured prides) and routinely kill other lions (even cubs). The average lion, albeit way less physically formidable than…

This is correct. I only chose the tiger as a metaphor because tigers are top predators and are solitary. They rarely meet other tigers.

If we need an example of a highly social predator species that rarely kill each other in conflicts, that'd be wolves.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#786

Post by gota »

gota wrote: post #382
cogman10 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest. You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]). It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4]…

Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%) conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing conspiracies, and many others - As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly

*discredit

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#787

Post by lumb63 »

bbor wrote: post #761
lumb63 wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tell…

Sorry if I offended by bringing up the AI - I was trying to use it to offer many possible avenues of more specific disagreement, so I could understand their stance better. Less about convincing or arguing. On the rest of it… I think i asked a bunch of questions last night and am now facing the harsh reality that the answer is “some people see the whole shape of the world and human experience completely differently th…

Of course I’m only speculating on how someone who has lived their entire life primitively might feel - I haven’t done that myself. I’m looking at things from the perspective of if I were born into a tribal, primitive society. As you alluded to in your previous post, things clearly change when you’ve lived a modern life.

Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death.

I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#788

Post by nehal3m »

bbor wrote: post #575
resolutebat wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His argument is basically that industrial society increases net suffering from violence and disease, because large populations are unsustainable and rely on the exploitation of the third world's poor. So instead of having one person die from a curable infection because nobody has antibiotics, you have five dying of infections because the population has exploded and antibiotics exist but they can't afford them.

The proof for that being vibes? Your specific example is quite obviously false in my eyes, but maybe I’m missing something obvious. How is some antibiotics worse than no antibiotics? I mean unless his stance was that a higher population is inherently bad because there’s more people to experience suffering? But surely all these people in this thread don’t support something THAT dumb. I’m so lost and his wiki page isn’…

I think the Unabomber would posit that a society that is complex enough to produce something as advanced as anti-biotics inherently causes human beings to lose their local autonomy and freedom (and by extension their dignity and happiness) due to the rigid organization such a system requires. To me it sounds like a trolley problem and reading his manifesto it seems he erred on the side of flipping the switch to the track with one person on it.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#789

Post by armitron »

always2slow wrote: post #533
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 did you do all that research into TK and not realize his mind was broken by MKUltra? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

His manifesto is anything but the product of a broken mind. Go ahead and read it, maybe you'll reconsider the MKUltra superficialities that in all likelihood had no connection whatsoever to TK's philosophy and later actions.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#790

Post by lostmsu »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #774
lostmsu wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? At what point in human history moving was more accessible than now? Prehistoric humans could barely move around and until recently slavery ment average Joe had 0 freedom.

Simply wrong and I provided a link with at least some references and passages that answer that

The quotes you mentioned say nothing about the two issues I raised.
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