41–50 of 95 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Didn’t he get an associate professorship, and at a pretty young age? That’s not productive? Not to mention the doctoral dissertation itself.
Everything that I've read about him indicates he was a rising star that willingly chose to withdraw from society, possibly due to mental illness. Far from the "vengeful deadbeat" that GP is claiming he was.
Kaczynski was a loser. He couldn't manage to turn a Harvard degree into a productive role in society so he waged a cowardly war on people who did nothing to harm him. The detailed list of specific injuries to victims here is sad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
I feel very sympathetic to his complaints about society. But he offers no solutions that would not embarrass a 4 year old. He wanted people, all people everywhere to give up tech. And he never bothered to address either of the obvious issues with this: (a) that whoever didn't would have a huge military advantage over those that did and would soon be in charge and (b) that we can only stay alive in the numbers we curr…
A bit like Marx in that regard.
Great problem descriptions, unworkable solutions. So far, no one has created a well working social order from first principles.
The conceit of Kaczynsci and other rebels is that they think forming sound criticisms absolves them from the responsibility to prevail. If you want to change the world, maybe try making something it wants.
If you are frustrated because nobody wants to listen to you, maybe index on solving that problem instead of forcing people to listen to you with bizarre political acts and attacking prominent individuals so as to capture some of the reflected attention for your tedious opinions. While that advice is for journalists, it's perhaps also applicable to would-be immitators of Kaczynski as well.
2. Person X becomes a terrorist for that purpose.
3. People say "Y'know, because of all those terrible things X did, I took a look at their manifesto, and they have some interesting ideas."
4. Person Y sees this, and repeat.
Suggestion: When people actually care about ideas, there are plenty of thinkers they could read and talk about, without encouraging future terrorists.
Kaczynski was a loser. He couldn't manage to turn a Harvard degree into a productive role in society so he waged a cowardly war on people who did nothing to harm him. The detailed list of specific injuries to victims here is sad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
I feel very sympathetic to his complaints about society. But he offers no solutions that would not embarrass a 4 year old. He wanted people, all people everywhere to give up tech. And he never bothered to address either of the obvious issues with this: (a) that whoever didn't would have a huge military advantage over those that did and would soon be in charge and (b) that we can only stay alive in the numbers we curr…
Kaczynski was a loser. He couldn't manage to turn a Harvard degree into a productive role in society so he waged a cowardly war on people who did nothing to harm him. The detailed list of specific injuries to victims here is sad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
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I never found his argument convincing. The main tension in his manifesto is motivated by an underlying assumption that isn’t accurate. He sees technology as being a distinct force in opposition to humanity rather than an extension of humanity and that is the source of his fears. There are a lot of reasons to believe that technology is not an opposing force, like the idea of embedded cognition and embedded action. I t…
Tech can start out as an extension, but what people fail to understand is that it can become slowly become autonomous over time, kinda like how a party gets out of control and people start putting holes in walls. I think technologists rarely, if ever, talk about this because a lot of what enables our blind pursuit of technology is to say that technology must be an extension of humans and so it can never become autono…
If not, then it's just another tool for humans. We are excellent tool users, and leverage everything we can to expand our senses and abilities. We already successfully wield tools of unimaginable power.
If technology itself can have agency, then it truly is a paradigm shift for the millennia. There has never been an entity that is better at tool-use than us humans. All bets are off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? Didn’t he get an associate professorship, and at a pretty young age? That’s not productive? Not to mention the doctoral dissertation itself.
Everything that I've read about him indicates he was a rising star that willingly chose to withdraw from society, possibly due to mental illness. Far from the "vengeful deadbeat" that GP is claiming he was.
Note this isn't a diagnosis or an excuse (people often confuse explanations for excuses a lot), but it was a very interesting comparison that illuminated a lot of things. It provides a lot of potentials as to why for the steps in his life, opposed to the narratives which tend to be "prodigy turned evil" or "vengeful deadbeat" that are common in public narratives. I get why people like those narratives though, it's far less to process when we can paint someone in absolute ways.