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Ted Kaczynski has died

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#691

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…

>> 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. "Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participa…

> “Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. For example, we don’t know about the raving lunatics that don’t make headlines.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#692

My takeaway from Kacynski’s manifesto is that he makes an astute observation about the root causes of unhappiness, but then proposes an absurd solution. The astute observation is that a lot of unhappiness is driven by over-socialization and a commitment to inauthentic, subjective values. The solution, to tear down technology to force mankind to work on more primitive goals, only makes sense if there are no alternativ…

> only makes sense if there are no alternatives

Ah? I don't think it makes sense, alternatives or not. Neither the "commitment to subjective values* nor taking down society to solve that.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#693
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s an excuse or justification, but rather an explanation or motive. Unfortunately the brain is rather complex and can break in surprisingly many ways. One such example is the shooter who had cancer that pressed against his [iirc] amygdala. For Ted, we know that he was a subject of mkultra experiments, and that he was tortured. We know that he was deeply troubled and had communication issues. Perhaps h…

> In Greek αιτιολογώ and δικαιολογώ exist, where the former identifies causality and uses that to reason on the events and the latter is the same as justifying. To my knowledge the former doesn’t have a translation in English. In an effort to understand your post, I ran those through the English Wiktionary which some may not know, also has foreign words. αιτιολογώ: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CE%B9%CF%84%CE…

No, you (and PartiallyTyped) are right, αιτιολογώ is more or less "to explain" (but in a sense of trying to find the causes for), δικαιολογώ is basically exactly "to excuse".

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#694

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…

Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5]. If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7]. All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new…

> Friedrich Kittler

Whoever decided to not name him Adolf did the guy a huge favor.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On every measure, there was never a better time in the history of civilization to live.

Graeber & Wengrow propose an interesting set of 3 measures: >But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’…

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

You say "evil" as though it's something separate or different from basic chemical brain processes, i.e. something inherent to the person or something mystical like it came from the devil. There is no such thing as "evil", all our behavior stems from chemical/biological processes in the brain, and if you have a brain defect or chemically imbalances then yes, you too could end up murdering people. Get hit in the head enough times and you can end up murdering your wife and children, evil doesn't come into it.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#697
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…

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?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what measure? Certainly he is quite healthy and even considered sick.

On every measure, there was never a better time in the history of civilization to live.

> On every measure

Are we happier than we used to be? Are we more connected? Are we less lonely?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bas…

> He could easily have deemed a person who drives a car as worthy of death based on the same flimsy reasoning.

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

I'm not trying to engage in moral relativism.

How do I word this...

When we want to judge how evil his actions are, that's a moral question.

When we want to consider who he would have targeted, that's not a moral question.

When you say he has flimsy reasoning, the flimsy part was deciding to murder people.

He had specific motives for how he picked targets that weren't nearly as flimsy. A moral equivalence to "going open season" doesn't mean that "going open season" is actually how he operated.

Hopefully that makes my main point clear in a satisfactory way?

(And I had an explanation for the survey talk here but it's wordy and awkward so I'm going to cut it unless you want to see it.)

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