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 anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
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 metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction, environmental protection, long term planning against existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one.
One can say “non-capitalist society” yet mean that capitalism is the only thing that there ever is. Capitalism is a way to look at things, and it doesn’t require a modern society—social capital and economics of prestige is a thing since forever[0].
Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.
Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.
Yes, and I can even bet that unless a species is a hive mind, any intelligent species will have something like capitalism. The inverse is that to enforce a non-capitalist system, you have to brutally shape a society into something that is like a hive mind.
This seems true from our experiences attempting to implement non-capitalist systems in large societies. I think there could be a caveat for very small societies, especially those voluntarily joined, in which sharing goods and labor is possible with democratic modes of conflict management. There are also non-democratic capitalist systems that resort to extreme repression in order to resolve or suppress internal conflict. At scale, I agree no other economic system seems as compatible with democracy and individual choice, but as recent history has shown in Russia and China, capitalism itself doesn't seem sufficient to give rise to liberty.
I personally don't see these failing that you mention, far from it. Whatever you believe, this kind of propoganda claims stating your opinion as a fact, is very transparent, and just discredits your argument.
That's exactly what people with indefensible politics say during political discussions, when somebody raises a point they don't like and can't counter.
If your politics are too vile to discuss and defend, then don't participate in political discussions. And stop trying to inject your own politics while telling others not to mention their, like you've been hypocritically doing repeatedly.
None of those mentioned are ecofascists, especially not Simondon [1], that was the point: the true radicals destroy the future worlds, not directly the present one. Alan Turing destroyed all the multiverse branches [2] in which we don't use computation. Norman Borlaug [3] destroyed all the multiverse branches in which we don't have high-yield wheat.
Perhaps an even better parallel would have been Alexander Grothendieck [3], the mathematician of the 20th century (maybe even of the 21st century if concepts as the topos [4] are made into usable tools for deep neural networks [5]), but also a person who was teaching mathematics in Vietnam [6] while hiding from bombs. When the world burns, all that remains is the Glasperlenspiel [7].
Reading comprehension is certainly irrelevant if one is interested only in their tunnel-visioned thesis.
At no point the impromptu syllabus from above defends anyone or anything. In fact, it is so tame it didn't even mention more problematic, although arguably important and interesting, works such as Martin Heidegger's [1]. To think referencing someone as Günther Anders defends fascism is just too ludicrously functionally illiterate for any other words to be further possible.
His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in your favourite 4chan archive of choice.
Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.
People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one, but that's not the same thing.
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.
Not correct? Ad hominem? Moralist knee-jerk reaction? Absurd? Extreme? There is probably a more reasonable version of this disagreement, to put it lightly.
Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
And how would you know what, exactly? Have you actually taken the time to read any of the man's writing? Because I've been picking my way through his manifesto off and on this evening and so far what I'm encountering is calm, lucid, internally consistent, and a fairly accurate critique. Something about this exchange is reminding me of all of the decades of inarticulate hyperventilating about "communism" by individuals who hadn't bothered to so much as read the manifesto, much less examine Marx's writings.
Fascinating how good writing and surface intelligence can make absolutely insane ideas seem sensible. Deductive reasoning is, unfortunately, not absolutely reliable for people who have pattern loving brains and good enough memory to make long chains of deductions; evaluating the entire chain as a gestalt and with an eye towards the great amount of data we lack, about the present and past and true material causes, is a necessary step. Like the German electorate that voted for a madman without seeing thru him, or TK in the woods, we are all equipped with he neural machinery to go down this path.
Can you point at something in his manifesto that you'd classify as an "absolutely insane idea" ? I have the vague impression that people either don't engage at all with TK philosophy -but are happy to pass verdict nonetheless- or if they do, simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that arises and immediately reach for quick relief ("madman", "insane ideas", "MKUltra" etc)
Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” First sentence. Does he object to the diminution of child hood death or violent death, or in his mind does being alienated from nature (fixable in principal by personal choices) outweigh the death of ones children? Totally insane.
On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.
For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.
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…
I disagree with this characterization. It’s not that reading Mein Kampf would brainwash you, it’s that reading it for it’s “nuggets of wisdom” is an insane, dangerous thing to do. I sorta thought that part would be uncontroversial but who knows
Considering his lack of success and the fact that he had better military thinkers as subordinates, looking for "military wisdom" from Hitler sounds like the kind of thing you'd do because you had an ulterior motive.
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.
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.
If I linked you to a 35,000 word essay on why you're wrong about this, would you read it? What if I told you it was generated by GPT-2? How much of it would you have to read before you could decide the rest wasn't worthwhile?
I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.
In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.
All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"
My time and attention is limited and I'd rather not spend it on the scribblings of someone whose intellectual work is only read because of its association with his more famous work sending letter bombs.
This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures.
Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
First, I'm not sure you're using "quick" properly here. There is no trajectory - only individual cases. We can easily consider his actions unjustifiable and yet consider similar actions against a brutal dictator justifiable without straying into hypocrisy.
Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.
Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths.
Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
Anyway, if we want to apply utilitarian reasoning, taking someone’s ideas seriously simply because he garnered attention through random killings would seem to encourage more people to do violence for various different causes.
Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what appears to be him having a critique of the worship of technique, which is an interesting thought.
You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades.
That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.
Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.
I'm curious to hear what in Ellul echoes Ted's manifesto? Ellul seems very like a very astute and interesting thinker, and Ted obviously referenced him, but to say that it's a "popular reduction" seems like a stretch to me. I say this based on this understanding of Ellul, pulled from his wikipedia page:
> The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society.
Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible."
Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...
“Do you like the unabomber’s ideas but get embarrassed when you talk about the unabomber in front of your friends? Try talking about Ellul instead, you might sound more worldly that way”
If you’re embarrassed to talk about anti-technological ideas in this current technological dystopia, you’re as oversocialized as Ted described you in his works.
It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.
This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.
> As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.
> The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.
> I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.
> My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.
Thank you for the anarchist references, with how conservative his ideas were and not only against "leftists" / libs I was looking for this perspective here (given anarchism gets unfairly lumped in with leftism or authoritarian communisms even as post-left anarchism is a thing)
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] can really sway public opinion.
One of his later letters he said was against Eco-fascisim. basically saying that a lot of it is driven by racism or some sort of political/social ideal. That these factors are not distributed equally globally means that it would never work as a long term strategy.
If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over.
In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted.
Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!
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
But the very fact that Kaczynski's ideas were widely published and read directly led to his arrest. If the consideration is to be purely strategic, his case should be an argument in favor of dissemination.
Would you apply the same logic then to Winston Churchill, the British monarchy and its government? Under the guise of "civilizing natives", they were responsible for exterminating and murdering large sections of the population across Ireland, Africa, India, Middle-East and East Asia. Churchill was racist and a terrorist to many in the colonized world but was a prolific author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What's the difference between him and the unabomber?
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.
That is the saddest thing. He had some great ideas and knew how to communicate them. He just didn't think he would be taken seriously unless he used the bomb cheat code on life to get notoriety. I suspect that if he had gone the path of writer with publishing, not only would his works be more popular, there would have actually been a realistic means of implementing some of his ideas.
He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
Read his manifesto, they’re detailed. I was shocked for a straight week when I read it, I couldn’t believe I have been lied to my entire life. Or better yet his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery
Yeah... I appreciate you taking the time to respond but "read this 35,000 word manifesto by a schizophrenic idealogical serial killer whose conclusions you already know you find vapid and deplorable" is not a great pitch lol. Was just hoping to hear some highlights. I think I'll just have to wander along for the rest of my life without gaining any insight as to why Hacker News is so in love with that work, beyond some variety of SV-guilt!
Since we had know TK had been sick for a while and that this was coming soon, for about a month for I have been trying to distill TK's work down as an article about how others have gravitated towards his writing. It is not in praise of him it is just a study of some key points and as to why so many have seen solace in these works - especially over the last decade.
Normally I could write something like that over a week end but this article... it is an absolute doozy and the further in I go the worse it gets!
The issue is, you cannot really condense his writings down without doing a total dis-service to the points being made. Either you are going to misrepresent a point and it get wildly misinterpreted OR you come off a little to in praise of it.
It is very clear that TK had an academic background, even going so far as numbering the paragraphs - and in his book, The Anti-tech revolution : Why and how - he is very clear at the beginnings that these writings are not meant to be just read but studied. I don't disagree, they are written in a very tight manner. So while Industrial society and its future is 35,000 words, it is very specific in those words. It is about a 2 hour read, or you can just find a audio version on youtube.
If I had to summarize the essence of his works, he had a very decent analysis of the flaws of technology based societies. He had absolutely no idea on how to actually bring about change or even know where to start. The subsequent 27 years of writing from jail showed that he could analyses the problems and potential failings of revolutionary tactics but had no idea of how to actually analyze what technology as good or bad.
There is a reason he was called an insane Genius.
Personally speaking, yeah he was right on a lot of things... now what?
I ain't going to do what he did and try to bomb the world into submission, that is just idiotic. It is all just a some really good analysis but with no means of achievable execution. I more worry about others that are coming after him that will do a lot more damage. Anders Beivik who killed many at a youth summer came in 2011 also deeply reference TK's works in his manifest - an example of how this line of thinking can only lead down a dark and terrible path. But doesn't mean you shouldn't read these things.
One can read these things and take away some very good points without having to internalize the whole thing. Aristotle said something like that, you can read and think about ideas as though they are true and not necessarily have to believe them.
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
Oddly, the "why don't you go live in the woods", is the extremist view. Like "if you believe in God, why are you not going to church every day and out proselytizing", "If you are a vegan why aren't you out shutting down factory farms.", "If you care about environment why don't you live in a hut".
Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.
Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.
So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.
You see, your view is the extreme one.
And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.
I don’t think he had just some “good points”, I think he’s completely right on the matter that modern (post steam engine & guns) technology is harmful for human life.
who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas.
The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
It's not their ideas, exactly. It's their moral judgment.
See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged").
So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
That still does not imply we should listen to people like Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should not matter. If someone else with better decisions making recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can listen to him.
The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.
While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are humanly understandable with the ability to impute human motivations. He intentionally maimed and killed people.
Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis.
And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change.
All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat).
For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models.
The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool.
Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation):
"There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases."
And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections.
Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging.
I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion.
Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow.
And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy people alive at any present moment if I could guarantee that those living on this planet now and those born in the future could live healthier, happier, and more meaningful lives as a result. Killing and maiming people in retaliation is a terrible way of getting there. As a final note, I'm currently in the process of my own exodus to leave the city (wish me luck!) to follow this path of voluntary simplicity and pacifism, lest anyone accuse me of trying to improve society somewhat.
I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible: could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack?
I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone.
I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and statements, not attacking anyone individually.
I'd consider personal attacks to be ad hominem, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my comment — I am trying to point out what is and what isn't a logically valid and argument.
Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.
On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.
Even this:
> what you have written is intellectually dishonest
is likely to land as a personal attack.
Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,
(2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.
No it's not. It's a technical term which means that the person is knowingly making an argument that is not valid.
See the definition of validity [0] in logic.
When I say they are "intellectually dishonest" I mean they are attempting to persuade others with an appeal to emotion in a subtly-crafted paragraph that looks like a rational argument, but technically is not a rational argument --- because it is invalid --- and they know it is invalid.
They are attempting to win by emotional persuasion rather than a series of rigorous rational conclusions.
How my statement that someone is intellectually dishonest is a personal attack, I do not know. Perhaps people skip over the "intellectually" qualifier and jump straight to the "dishonest" part?
"Knowingly making". You don't know. And, in fact, I wrote the comment that you were replying to, and I was absolutely not knowingly making an argument that is not valid, and I still disagree with your argument where you claim that it is invalid.
You're not psychic; you're not omniscient. You're wrong sometimes. And you're wrong here in your judging of my honesty.
And when you act like you can judge what you can't, and you judge negatively, and you say so publicly, that is at least indistinguishable from a personal attack.
So: Calling someone dishonest is almost always going to be considered a personal attack, whether you intended it that way or not. And if you do it here, it will eventually get you banned. Attack the logic or the data, not the person's intentions.
I'm sorry, I'm still not trying to personally attack anyone. I didn't even realize my comment would be interpreted as offensive rather than a statement of fact.
This is the definition of intellectual dishonesty according to Wikipedia:
"Intentionally committed fallacies in debates and reasoning are called intellectual dishonesty."
I read your argument as "this man emotionally affected me via a personal connection I have, therefore his argument is invalid" and interpreted it as a logical fallacy. I assumed you made this knowingly because that is like a super basic logic 101 fallacy. I wasn't trying to personally attack you or say anything about your character or intellect. I was just trying to point out that you had committed a logical fallacy and that I assumed you already knew this.
I've replied to you more fully at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277721, but want to mention something here too. The problem with what you're saying here is that word "intentionally". You can't know someone else's intent from internet comments. Overwhelmingly, when person A says something negative about B's intent, B will react with hurt feelings, anger, or outrage, because they don't think that was their intent at all. (This is exactly what happened in this case, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277408.)
It will get you a very long way indeed if you simply remind yourself that you can't know someone else's intent and edit your comments until they no longer include any assumptions about intent. If, in addition to that, you make your comments without pejoratives (and especially without pejoratives that have anything to do with other commenters), you should be in good shape.
I believe that you're sincerely asking for clarity here, so I hope this helps!
It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality.
The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?
And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
See, Kaczynski's theory is also about morality. He's complaining about the damage that technology does. Well, why do we care that it does damage? That's a moral question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making a moral argument.
So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people, that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we would be better off without technology. I can't trust his whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.
I never intended to make an argument against Kaczynski's ideas, I'm just pointing out that people could have reasonable moral objections against distributing his work. It's "negotiating with terrorists" kind of stuff. Whether his ideas are good or bad is an entirely separate matter.
> We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed. And I never said you're wrong, either, or that Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.
Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology.
I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this specific case, there’s no reason to believe that a completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody. I’d be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder didn’t have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same reason I’d be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no fully functional prototypes.
Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as we find programming?
He was unhinged. But it’s hard to argue he wasn’t a master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20 years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till their family turned them in.
I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown amounts of time when he was captured.
Dude’s a murderer. I’m glad he was stopped, and it’s sad he wasn’t caught on day one.
I agree. And history shows that it’s important to acknowledge skill in situations like this. One of the primary reasons Germany was so deadly to my ancestors is due to the oratory genius of one man. I’ve been reading though The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a fantastic and dispassionate analysis of such evil. It makes you question what might’ve been different had others studied the means by which evil people exert power, as Ted has done here.
Remember, authorities weren’t able to catch him. His family turned him in. It’s only through luck that his spree came to an end. That alone makes his particular case worth intensive analysis.
Is there? Whoops. I’ve been doing it wrong for about 20 years now.
(My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)
In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.
If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.
It was a live bomb. You don’t just keep live bombs sitting around your house unless you plan on using them…
Also wait what even is this comment. Why are you just praising the Unabomber unprompted? That’s not what the person you’re replying to was even talking about…
I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them.
Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.
There was only one live bomb found and he did intend to use it.
> Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.
Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made with a society he doesn't respect. His calculus for who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme, who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the next perceived slight.
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?
I'm not defending him. I'm simply stating the fact that him having a bomb in his possession is insufficient evidence to convict him of the crime in question.
I am exonerated by fact. The prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime related to the live bomb they found.
What are you going to do to argue against that? Deny history? It already happened. He wasn't convicted.
I didn't even call you out, yet here you are acting like you've been personally attacked. You weren't. Whatever your fascination with Kaczynski, his manifesto is only of significance because of his terrorism. We're better off that he was found, arrested, and convicted.
Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't exist.)
I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life. Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?
Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.
It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.
I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.
The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.
>Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.
I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
> And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.
Unrelated. Please, do share a link where Ted Kaczynski was convicted of a crime in connection with the unplanted bombs in question, because that's what I have been talking about in this entire string of comments.
I am exonerated by fact. Ted was not convicted of a crime for the unplanted bomb because there was insufficient evidence to do so. End of story ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
"Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted."
"He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability."
"Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt."
Aren't those lines all replies in order? Then you're using "reasonable doubt" as a couterargument to a moral judgement.
I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
Sorry, I really am trying to be as charitable as possible with my interpretations of these comments.
I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
> I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
That's fine with respect to your claims, but it means your claims can't be used as-is to counter other claims that aren't on the same framework. Those people aren't trying to convict him.
> I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
I don't think anyone is doing that in this thread? "he stopped because he was arrested" isn't an invalid takedown of his ideas. There was a mention of ideas further upstream, but from that comment on they don't come up.
I suppose it would be like how the U.S has a history of using nuclear bombs, has a bunch more assembled and ready to be used, but claims to have no plans to actually use them.
Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.