If there is that much demand for a more traditional bowling experience, it seems like one of the bowlers complaining about the "new" experience should open an alternative. And will make a killing.
It's extremely capital-intensive business so you need to get loans/investment and banks/investors are rightfully going to ask "What's stopping Bowlero from price crushing you?" and your answer is going to be "Nothing."
Normal Anti-Trust would be prevent this but since we have thrown that out the window under consumer harm, Bowlero can claim "See, our lower prices are good for consumer!", be ignored until they crush you then raise the prices after you are crushed.
Here's a recent X post I wrote entitled "What I learned about startup founders from being the worst pilot in the AirWing."
At the age of 25, I was sent straight from my F/A-18 training squadron to a forward deployed squadron aboard the USS Nimitz.
The fastest way to build a reputation as the New Guy is safe and predictable carrier landings. The fastest way to be put on notice is to suck behind the boat.
Within 2 weeks, I was solidly in the latter category. I struggled deeply, especially with night landings.
At first, I kept catching the “one-wire,” meaning I was too low when crossing the back of the ship.
Then, in later flights, to compensate, I started “boltering” a lot – meaning I’d put on too much power at the end, fly too high, and miss all the wires completely. Then I’d have to circle around for another attempt.
There was one night where I went around 5 times before finally catching a wire and landing. I expended so much fuel in doing so I had to hit the airborne tanker to refuel about halfway through.
I was ranked 98 out of 99 pilots in the AirWing after my first six weeks.
I was on notice. Whenever I came in to land, all the senior aviators aboard the ship nervously watched to see what would happen.
Then the bottom fell out. One night I landed the first time – but caught another one-wire. Over the common carrier frequency came the Voice of God. This was incredibly rare – the carrier CO never interrupted carrier ops.
“Son, I can’t have you landing like that aboard my ship.”
I was petrified – and what little confidence I had was destroyed. As I taxied off the landing area and was waiting for the plane to be chained to the deck, in the pitch black, I let my guard down and accidentally released the brakes. I almost ran over the plane captain – and was only saved because my back-seater screamed “brakes!” to me.
When I returned to the ready room, I got reamed out by my squadron CO. I was benched.
Those were the two longest days of my Navy career. I didn’t know if I would cut it. I saw no way out.
Then the skipper sent me back up. I was terrified – but he knew the only way to get confidence back was to Do the Hard Thing.
Again and again. And again.
Eventually, I figured it out. I was never better than middle of the pack in landing grades – but I was safe and predictable. I also found other areas to excel in, like air-to-air tactics.
This dark period in my life gave me a deep understanding of grit and resilience.
In conversations with founders, I now know what to look for in how people respond to challenging situations. How one responds in dark moments – and which people believed in them enough to give them another shot.
I also now have a desire to seek out the hard moments to walk beside high potential folks who hit the inevitable roadblocks in life.
It’s in the those moments where thought partnership matters most – and where being there matters most.
One of my good friend’s dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski when she was a young teenager.
A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him.
And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for.
Kaczynski May have said some interesting things, but he physically tore apart the lives of many, leaving a wake of destruction during his crusade.
Actions speak louder than words. Even eloquent ones.
When threads about Kaczynski come up, I try to remind people that the guy attempted to take down an American Airlines jetliner. He got a bomb on board in the cargo bay designed to explode at altitude --- and it did indeed explode, caused the plane to lose pressure, and filled the cabin with smoke. There were 78 people on board that flight, and but for the skill of the pilots, Kaczynski would have murdered all of them.
However, I think there's a difference between sympathy, empathy, and understanding.
I apologize in advance; the rest of this comment will be a bit long-winded (rambly?), but it's hard to make cultural points concisely:
One of the reactions after World War II was "Never Forget," and we built a whole infrastructure to understand how what happened came to pass. People study many of the most murderous madmen of history, because it's important to understand.
Any serious study will be complex. Germany went from being basically a ruined nation to an economic, military, and industrial superpower in a short amount of time. Hitler did many things to come to power which were effective. The old saying "Mussolini made the trains run on time" isn't quite true, but if he had, any study would show how he did it.
Those are important problems to study. I'll take the Mussolini example, since it's not quite true. Compare two universes:
1) Only Mussolini could make the trains run on time
2) Anyone could make the trains run on time
Which one is more likely to lead to another Mussolini?
This may sound crass in American culture -- there is a tendency to equate any discussion of Hitler with hate -- but I come from a culture which took a different (and I think more effective) stance. We look at what happened, and try to understand, without glorification or downplaying of the problems. The most difficult lies are those which mix fact with fiction, and it's actually important to tease the two apart. If we all acknowledge the facts, the next madman can't use them to support a fiction.
It's difficult to reply to this without implying I'm defending Kaczynski or advocating for violence. I'm not - and I wouldn't like to be misconstrued here, as I'm replying about violence in general.
I would say that violence should never be the preferred solution, but that at times it's the only solution that has any chance of success. This is not to say that it's a "good" approach, or something you should enjoy doing. However, if you (or your people) don't have any other way to facilitate changes that are non-negotiable for you (such as your fundamental right to live being threatened), should you turn the other cheek? Is resorting to civil violence unacceptable in such situations?
We've had examples of civil violence bringing drastic changes when people's lives are being threatened by governments, hunger or societal structures. Notably, the French Revolution. Is it unacceptable for people to kill their king if they don't have anything to eat, and the queen tells them to eat cake if they can't eat bread? Depends on your moral stance. Would the issues that the revolution focused on change if people weren't violent? Highly doubt it.
Of course, I am not equating the French Revolution to the Unabomber: it's drastically different to kill innocent civilians with mailed bombs because of "principles" than it is to behead your king because you don't have anything to eat. Violence is the only reasonable choice in some (albeit rare) situations. The acceptability of it very much depends at what's at stake.
with more dialogue like this, even if the instigator is less willing to come to the table as diplomatically, less willing to talk openly, at least initially, so long as true discourse can occur, the need for violence will hopefully decrease over time.
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.
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.
Not trying to minimize it, but it's difficult to measure violence, what's the level of violence of a rapist? of someone with a polluting lifestyle of 100TCO2eq/year (violence to the environment, so distributed to people)?
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 Kaczynski?
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 be.
Someone could say, but his mental illness made him believe he has to kill those people for the good of humankind. Firstly, how do we truly know this as true? Perhaps he just loved the feeling of power it gave him so he came up with the justification. Being an intelligent man he came up with a convincing story.
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 he felt that the bombings were the only way he could garner focus on the problems he saw; but that is likely rationalisation on my end. It should also be noted that Ted lived very isolated, and that can cause severe damage to the brain. If you find yourself alone in a foreign country that you work in and no social support system or many interactions, you might experience this and see yourself changing.
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 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.
My personal interpretation is that this like the difference between an explanation and an excuse, but perhaps someone here has a better interpretation.
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".
Αιτιολογία and Αιτιολογώ are a noun and a verb derived from αίτιo (αίτια for plural) and λογος, which roughly speaking mean a [set] of identified cause(s) and “reason” respectively.
So this is purely causal without imposing the person’s subjective judgement onto the action or event; simply expressing that given the circumstances, it makes sense that the events occurred, whether the person was right or justified in acting as they did is a different story. So given the events I can reason why the action occurred.
For δικαιολογία / δικαιολογώ, the words are derived from δίκαιο and λόγος again; the former meaning the person is in the right, or is morally correct from the perspective of the person expressing it. Thus, justifying is closer to δικαιολογώ.
For an example; chores are boring, so I didn’t do them even though I promised I would. You can reason why I didn’t do them but you can’t claim I was justified in not doing them. I promised I would and breaking promises is generally immoral without s good justification or a reason.
Are you talking about the difference between proximal and ultimate causes? As in the proximal cause of these people dying was an explosion from a bomb set by Kaczynski, while the ultimate cause was that the things that caused Kaczynski's poor mental health that led him to those actions.
Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.
It's not an excuse, but at some point there is little else to be done. The benefit of society as a whole must be considered.
Take as an example pedophiles. There is a movement in the netherlands which tries to implore them to speak up about their "dark" desires and seek help. In which case they should be helped. But once they have acted on their inner demons I don't see how we should just say well they weren't themselves.
What sort of thing does this word "evil" refer to? Is it simply the wish to do harm? Is it evil to want to harm someone that is harming you?
I think the word only makes sense in the context of religious (or pseudo-religious) beliefs about metaphysical forces that drive events. I don't believe in such forces. Believing in evil is like believing in God.
One problem I have with the word is that once you define a person as evil, you've placed them beyond the reach of reason or persuasion. The only reasonable response becomes to remove them completely.
In his own journals he wrote that he didn't claim to be "altruist or to
be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race", instead
insisting that he acted "merely from a desire for revenge".
Aren't many aspect of this society, like overconsumerism, overpollution, waste, disrespect for the environement, air flights and other kind of avoidable impactful leisures pure evil too?
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.
i really don’t know what to count as mental illness now. is it when people make decisions that aren’t consonant with expectations of a reasonable person? are stupid people mentally ill? what about religious believers who believe, for example, that muhammad ascended to heaven on horseback?
coherence of thought may be a yardstick, and if so ted is as coherent and articulate as it can be. was he wrongly inspired? did he hate so much the current political organization that emasculates any single individual from achieving much? or causing a consequential national debate? did he take his anger too far? thinking about these, and having read all his material, i think we shouldn’t consign him to mental illness. it’s too convenient, it’s a worthless external judgement, and one that he vehemently rejected.
ted was a sane man acting on his belief. no different than me praying every morning and going to church every sunday to thank god for how far he has brought me.
His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family
business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague
who had dumped him after two dates.
From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he
had built by hand, without heating, plumbing or electricity.
Perhaps we should watch out for socially inept STEM graduates.
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.
That's just something people make up when they want to demonize someone for their words, but don't have any actual evidence that their words are causing harm.
People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality.
> People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality
That is not what stochastic terrorism means.
Stochastic terrorism is the observation that while you can not express specifically, where and how terror will occur, you know that with prob 1, it will occur and is a consequence of people rallying and exploiting crazy people.
Of course, anyone can deny that they explicitly told people to commit acts of terror, because they didn’t, and therefore they can not be held responsible for what the mentally ill did; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cause and effect.
A constant barrage of people expressing “think of the children”, or blaming minorities for the perils of society is going to slowly but surely deteriorate and rally people into supporting murder and other heinous acts by distorting their reality and allowing them to justify atrocities.
Expressing that some [hero] needs to do something, nudge nudge wink wink doesn’t mean you did not cause an event, people don’t exist in vacuums, and all of our interactions provably matter.
I really fail to see why my response is deemed inappropriate by HN standards. Apparently I have also been flagged and I can't even comment. I really don't understand what I am doing wrong and would appreciate some feedback.
Your friend’s dad’s death is also my (very trivial) connection to Kaczynski. That morning our family had gone Christmas tree shopping, and the tree was scheduled to be delivered later that day. As it turned out, the delivery driver was also a Verona volunteer firefighter and ended up responding to the explosion, delaying our tree to the next day. It’s a super trivial connection, but it has always stuck with me.
It also makes a map of human affect. We can all pretend such a thing matters, but most horrors never touch our life and would never be known without the news.
The fact that a random guy gave his spare time to help others is notable. The key point is the Christmas tree deliverer being a first responder. It's a hell of a thing.
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 manifesto many years ago.
From that, his story is sad. He didn't need to go insane and start bombing people. He had potential to do other, better things.
I watched the Netflix documentary, and the commentary from his brother and sister in law was very moving. The brother, because he still loved him, but had to come to terms with what he did and do the right thing. The brother's wife, who it seemed flagged him as mentally ill from nearly the beginning.
I think this is an unkind assessment to Kaczynski. What he did was wrong, there isn't denying that, but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.
This is not to excuse all his actions as we cannot know really the full extent of the experiment he participated in without a proper understanding of what was going to happen to him and the potential outcomes.
His positions in his manifesto aren't exactly bad positions to take, his actions in bringing attention to it were bad and hurt many innocents.
I think it's possible to condemn his actions while also recognizing his non-violent contributions and the elements in his life that may have contributed to the creation of the Unabomber. After reading about the experiments he attended, it's very hard for me to remove those as a contributor to the Unabomber; they weren't the sole contributor, but I can't imagine having such derision and psychological abuse for 200+ hours without walking out of it maladjusted.
The purpose of such statements I think isn't to excuse Kaczynski's actions, but instead to ensure that we aren't just imagining some video game or movie villain that appeared and the FBI heroically stopped; he was a human being who lived a pretty normal life, and then he changed and became the Unabomber. The latter is extremely sad and appalling given the damage, and I think the latter is made even worse by remembering the former; he used to be a pretty smart guy and contributed well to society.
It's a sad story no matter how you view Kaczynski, but I think that we are worse off if we don't recognize that he was at some point a fairly normal human being, teaching maths and studying maths, who went through a lot of psychological issues, and came out as the Unabomber.
> I think this is an unkind assessment to Kaczynski.
Only if you have a stigmatizing view of mental illness.
> but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician
Famously, so was John Nash, who was schizophrenic. To say nothing about the large number of very accomplished people in many fields. Mentally ill people can be very smart and talented.
> and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.
The onset of schizophrenia tends to happen in late adolescence. This lines up with his time at Harvard. I think it's wrong to blame the psychological experiment thing for this. It's like people who blame drugs for making people schizophrenic, without understanding that they may have had the condition before.
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.
The positive comments are mostly in response to his view/ideas/philosophy, as in Industrial Society and Its Future and his subsequent books - I don't think there's a single person here condoning the bombings.
If you were to read his works you might find that he wasn't so deranged after all, quite the opposite.
Edit: In terms of the philosophy/view I mean. The bombings were made out of bitterness and anger and are inexusable.
Had Kaczynski not conducted his campaign of bombings he would have had no leverage to get the Washington Post to publish his manifesto.
I re-skimmed the manifesto earlier today. It's not uninteresting, but I don't think it's the sort of thing which can be considered or appreciated outside the context of his violent acts. For one, no one would have read it if Kacynzski had been a nonviolent academic.
As for bitterness and anger, well, here's a quote I pulled somewhat randomly from the text.
"We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society."
>He justifies the trade-offs that come with losing industrial society as being worth the cost.
That is fucking deranged. Describing it as deranged is an understatement, and it blows my mind that you’re defending it _on an internet forum_. Only someone who’s never seen someone die of violence or disease could ever say some shit like that.
Today is reminding me that I need to take hacker news commenters much less seriously…
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.
As far as I can tell, yes, that is exactly his stance: each suffering person is a net negative, regardless of others who are not. So five people suffering is always worse than one person suffering.
And please don't mistake people explaining his theories with supporting them.
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.
I think the parent comment was deleted? And I’m quoting the wiki on his manifesto.
I don’t see “no action or choice is perfectly good” as an excuse to take bs like “what if disease and famine and ignorance are good for us” seriously.
And that’s not really what the trolley problem is about, AFAIU it’s about agency and culpability - I think you’re more discussing basic utilitarianism?
There are PLENTY, certainly thousands and probably tens of thousands, of works which represent this monster's "view/ideas/philosphy" and weren't written by a deranged murderer. So you can understand the concern.
Considering the context (planet Earth) and the history of "righteous" actions of the department of "defense" of the nation he hails from, I believe it to be at least debatable.
Now, one can say "No, that's wrong!", but that doesn't make it wrong, though it can certainly cause it to appear that way.
If Ted is bad for his body count of innocent people, then what of us?
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 by studying his manifest. I dissected it like a surgeon, then read every book/reference that he gave. What would happen if I read every book he read. How does a bright young man go from reading philosophy and science conclude that men can't be saved.
How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse. TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end. TK felt that it was a necessary evil to collaborate with those he disagrees with (fascists, neo-nazis etc) as long as they can help bring down the current world order.
One dominat figure that kept popping up repeatedly when going through TK ramblings was Jaques Ellul, a French philosopher, not too well known outside France[1][2]. Ellul must have left quite the impact because even his manifesto is a homage on Ellul's biggest work: The Technological Society (La Technique)[1].
Ellul doesn't just talk about Technology but the whole domain of what we today call Systems Thinking. And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.
Ca 2018 I've read everything Ellul wrote and also read multiple times what TK wrote. I was depressed, like really really bad. There is no way out. I still wasn't criminally insane though. There had to be more than just "self-radicalization by information". Something was missing. It was isolation!
So I went on to teach myself bushcraft living off grid for a year in a similar way as TK. "Living off the land" as we call it in infosec (only it's the literal land :)). And this made me understand why TK had so much hate for civilization. It's the same hate the Sentinelese people must have for those visiting their shores[3].
Although I had no guns to feed myself with game meat as TK did. And I did not spend the same time out there. But after a few months without human contact I did understand what humanity has lost and how our connection to mother Earth has been severed.
While I never turned criminally insane and always disagreed with violence, I managed to understand what radicalized TK. It was being isolated. It happens in less severe ways to all of humanity via algorithm and screen time.
If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?
Jacques Ellul is not an easy read when you're vulnerable and searching for answers. Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.
TK is not comprehensible to anyone functioning and depending within society because he hated society and he believed it needed to be destroyed. It's pretty hard to have any empathy with this. Because he caused a lot of pain and suffering he robbed himself of leaving a legacy or a lesson.
> 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 psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly. The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.'
It boggles the mind how a psychologist could have thought that the experiments were even remotely ethical. TK was an evil man, no doubt, but Henry Murray is equally as evil IMHO, and somewhat culpable for the outcome.
>> 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 participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?
Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, and sometimes an evil murderer is just an evil murderer.
There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil.
"There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. "
You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?
Short term, sure, but if we want to solve murder in the long term, or just enjoy a stable society, held together by free choice and not fear or domination - then there is really no other choice in trying to understand what makes people go boom, so we can prevent that.
The alternative would be living in fortresses and going out only heavily armed.
Also, do you have a clear definition of "evil" at all?
I don't and I think it is kind of complicated. Starting with the old paradoxon: murder many people while you are in a army and you are a hero. Murder them on the street and you are a villain. So some say, all soldiers are evil murderers (and leave open the question on how to deal with the situation when they come for them or their children). Some say states are the evil. Others say stateless is the root of evil, etc.
And the Unabomber believed he did god, as he tried to end suffering. From a pure philosophical point of view, I can accept that there is a hypothetical chance, that he might be right.
But in all practical matters he was a crazy, dangerous fanatic (something I translate to "evil").
But the thing is, many people think actually like him, even though most don't act on it. But they might soon. So now is a time, when one can still reach them. But that only works, when you try to understand their motivations.
"What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!"
I am curious how you conclude that their environment is "virtually identical". I seriously doubt that. What is a paradise for someone can be hell for someone else and to the observer it looks the same.
So this would rather be an indication that the modelling is flawed.
And in the Unabombers case we have among ideological things the actual MKUltra experiment(I think no participant enjoyed it). A experiment designed to break someones mind. But to me it sounds you just concluded that he is evil and this wasn't a factor because other participants did not became mass murderers?
Side question, do you consider the designers of MKUltra as evil?
> “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.
> 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.
And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?
There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was only TK that went down this particular path.
TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.
If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.
Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.
> And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?
That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.
Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.
> There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".
It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…
> If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.
Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.
> Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.
Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.
>After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?
I've seen this argument a few times in this thread, and I hope I can explain my disagreement here. Even if not everyone subjected to this experiment becomes a terrorist, and even if there is something specific to Ted K.'s psychological makeup that made him become a terrorist after undergoing the experiment, that does not mean we can totally shift the blame away from the experimenters. Suppose that in the parallel world where he did not get experimented on, he would not have become a terrorist, we can still blame Murray (and/or the CIA) for taking (abnormal and extreme) actions that turned him into a terrorist.
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 everyone else, or at least reducing them to a comparable state of a worthy adversary, becomes pretty natural. Of course technology becomes an enemy, because it gives the rest of humans an unfair advantage; first of all, the key human technology, the society. Certainly a city is an uninhabitable place for a lone tiger, and of course it limits the tiger's freedom in uncomfortable ways.
Some people just really want to see the world burn.
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 good outweighs the bad. At one point that was a resounding yes. Currently? Harder to say. And if the answer to that question is no longer yes, then is there any meaningful way for a group of billions to coordinate conscious decisions and limitations about how technology should be approached, developed, and applied? Heavy stuff. Especially for a bunch of tech geeks.
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.
Is there anything in the world which is not a double-edged sword, something completely devoid of downsides? AFAIK only certain transcendent entities are declared to have this property.
Do you mean personal downside or societal downside? It could be argued that a well developed persona covering up innate sociopathy would be highly beneficial to a person and have no personal downsides, as long they as truly didn't care about others.
Just because anything has drawbacks if you look hard enough doesn't mean that it's impossible to differentiate innovations on that criterion. Surely you can see how aspirin is not as concerning as leaded gasoline.
Each and every parameter (even "population size") has an interval of 'adequate' values. Too few of anything, or too much of it, leads to major downsides.
> 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 a tiger, is a very dangerous contender against a tiger: he hits to kill.
I expect we'll see more people take up TK's manifesto if generational AI starts taking over jobs and causing displacement in the next few years. Technology won't even give other people the power to become the enemy, it will be the direct enemy.
>If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?
There's a name for people who go into the woods and live all alone: hermits. They don't tend to lose all empathy for others.
> If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?
It's important to remember that living alone for any significant period of time is not natural for human beings. It's not something that brings you closer to yourself, it is a stress on your mind that distorts your real, social self into something else.
Some people will be able to stay healthy after such an experience, some will not - just like any other stressor on our bodies. But losing empathy is a mental illness in itself, not some rediscovery of a bond with nature.
> Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.
I don't think this is as radical of an idea as you think as I think about this quite often. Basically the grim realizations of the harm I bring upon the earth in pursuit of my career, hobbies, and other lifestyle choices. It honestly bothers me regularly enough to make me question myself and my identity.
As for trying to understand TK - Did at any point you acknowledge - "I neither have his unique psyche and the lifetime of unique input that shaped it?" You didn't turn to criminality because you aren't TK. No amount of cosplaying will make you think like TK.
I think the detail that he was financially supported by his family while "escaping society" is relevant.
Don't want to be that meme guy who criticizes the person complaining about modern society via an iPhone, but it feel a touch hypocritical to be a genius planning to actively destroy modern society while living on handouts from that society while cosplaying at being an independent self-made man.
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.
> This is incredible, do you have a blog documenting
This feels like a joke. Even more than "I lived in the woods for years so I could figure out a mailbomber"
TK was mentally ill. Cutting himself off from society was a symptom, not the cause. Being a mimic doesn't give insight into the original aside from the act.
thanks. I try not to spend too much time online anymore and no longer have a blog.
As TK complained himself (paraphrasing) "you can not learn from academic papers or books about how to thrive in the wilderness. it's something you need to pick up out there.", and I too think it is pointless to put this in a blog.
Never tried psilocybin but once ate some shit mushrooms by accident that gave me the runs and resulted in some pretty bad dehydration. No fun when you need to go every 15 minutes and it's 3 AM and all you have for a toilet is a shovel to dig a ditch and leaves from a tree to wipe :D
never tied psilocybin and generally don't experiment with drugs when in nature. always wanted to try it though. but I'm too old for such things now
Too much or too few of anything isn't (by definition) adequate.
By craving for material comfort we want: to possess more => better yield => economies of scale.
This leads us to live in conditions which aren't appropriate to our current 'nature': large urban areas (where we often interact with people we don't know: this is stress-inducing esp. for males), specialization (we aren't ants), centralization and bureaucracy (we aren't cogs)...
I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but in the English language “Pollak” and its variations are derogatory terms for people of Polish descent. The preferred term is “Pole.”
I suspect the isolation misleads the subject. The subject loses their modes of interaction with civilization, that make civilization so far superior to the low-population density existence of prehistoric hunter gatherers.
Without those modes, the subject returns to civilization seeing only what civilization deprives one of: the great expanses of unspoiled wilderness.
And that produces the existential crisis and criminal insanity of TK.
> And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.
> It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly
I just happened to research this recently, rabbit hole a propos nothing: (1) in English, "Polack" is an ethnic slur for a Polish person; (2) in a handful of unrelated European languages, Polak is just the word for a Pole; just so y'all know.
It is interesting that the native word (because in the Polish language, "Polak" is a neutral standard word for a male Pole; a female would be Polka, just like the dance) mutated to a slur an ocean away.
edit: Only one of 3 victims was killed in his home:
> In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
They did PR for Union Carbide following Bhopal, so not hypothetical:
"Considered the world's worst industrial disaster, over 500,000 people in the small towns around the plant were exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC). Estimates vary on the death toll, with the official number of immediate deaths being 2,259.
In 2008, the Government of Madhya Pradesh paid compensation to the family members of 3,787 victims killed in the gas release, and to 574,366 injured victims. A government affidavit in 2006 stated that the leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries. Others estimate that 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases."
Vigilantism isn't justice. There was no trial or finding of guilt or responsibility before the 'accused' were attacked. While I'd like executives to be more personally liable, the answer to stopping the corruption is judicial, legislative, and/or executive reform.
Is that a real question? The answer is very obvious. Those people are a million times less culpable.
(Yes, I know it's sarcastic. But sarcasm still needs to make sense to be effective. You can't say the equivalent of "that logic leads to X very bad thing" if you get the logic wrong.)
The logic is really simple: someone can come up with almost any reason to justify murder if they believe themselves solely capable of such judgment.
If someone recognizes the failings of every human then they are less prone to pass judgment.
Did Ted K not feel justified in his actions? Did he not find his own murderous actions acceptable? Why would he do these things if he didn’t think he was devoid of the sin he saw in his targets?
> The logic is really simple: someone can come up with almost any reason to justify murder if they believe themselves solely capable of such judgment.
I think if you do a survey you'll find lots of people agreeing that major oil executives and PR should be judged harshly. Not murder, but definitely being judged as bad in a way that everyday people pass.
I don't think your argument works at all. Harshly judging some people is not even close to harshly judging almost everyone. The former does not beget the latter.
> If someone recognizes the failings of every human then they are less prone to pass judgment.
Less, sure, but these are pretty egregious cases.
> Did Ted K not feel justified in his actions? Did he not find his own murderous actions acceptable? Why would he do these things if he didn’t think he was devoid of the sin he saw in his targets?
You definitely don't have to think you're free of sin to target sinners.
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 based on a position of moral superiority over the PR executive is to follow the same psychopathic trajectory as Ted K.
Calmly calculating by oneself who is most worthy of death in a manner that selects a PR executive and then executing on such a plan, as a categorical imperative, is akin to open season on humanity itself.
However, the value judgement that any of us could be seen unfairly in a negative manner and therefore worthy of compassion and understanding, as a categorical imperative, is in comparison universally better and by quite a large margin.
I am engaging in moral absolutes. You and the person I originally responded to are engaging in moral relativism.
> 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.)
When we want to consider who he would have targeted, that's not a moral question.
What you’re missing here is empathy.
When he considered his targets for murder that is indeed a moral question for him.
He could have considered anyone driving an automobile. Why do I say this? Because for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual and a PR executive is even farther removed. Perhaps it isn’t for you. Perhaps someone else would consider all people of a certain ethnicity a target for murder and based on statistical evidence.
The point is that when you allow for individuals to come up with their own personal reasons for murdering a member of a certain group that you allow for an infinity of reasons and targets.
At least a few people picked up on this thread based on my original pithy comment.
> When he considered his targets for murder that is indeed a moral question for him.
But it's using his moral system, which was relative when it comes to murder.
It's not how you and I think about murder that matters.
> The point is that when you allow for individuals to come up with their own personal reasons for murdering a member of a certain group that you allow for an infinity of reasons and targets.
If you allow anyone to do so, then across all of them you'll see an infinity of reasons, yes.
But this isn't about allowing, and this is about a specific murderer. A specific murderer won't use an infinity of reasons.
> for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual
Let's just assess harm here and not talk about murder or anything. I don't think Ted K had much reason to disagree with this statement. But you're missing a crucial factor. The consumer buys one lifetime supply of gas. The producer sells a million. If we split the blame equally for each transaction, then each consumer has .5 blame units and the producer has 500 thousand blame units.
This Netflix documentary on the Unabomber was pretty interesting; there are other sources I'm sure, but this seemed good. His participation in a multi-year Harvard psychology study was a fascinating facet to the story and his development.
See my other comment in this thread as you’ve misinterpreted what I’ve said. I’m still trying to figure out how, but perhaps I’ve internalized Christian ethics to a point where my stance seems obvious to me but not to you!
They could be for the pro extra-judicial killing position you are presenting.
There is sorrow in the world in almost every walk/product/political position. If you can’t recognise your culpability, then we are all doomed to be righteously murdered according to you. No one can sanely support that position. It’s irrational and borderline crazy.
> > And that makes it acceptable to execute a random executive from the firm?
> When one is incapable of recognizing their own culpability in the sorrows of the world, yes.
I am assuming that we all know this is unacceptable and I am explaining the reasoning behind why someone might find this acceptable, namely, and let's quote Outkast this time:
I know you'd like to think your shit don't stank, but
Lean a little bit closer, see
Roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh
Yeah, roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh
So if you happen to be someone who thinks your own shit don't stank you're probably apt to exhibit any number of moral failings.
One could argue that if Ted K recognized that he was as much of a sinner as his victims that he would not have justified his murderous actions.
The original comment speaks of knowing someone killed by Kaczynski. I never said anything concerning the number of his maiming victims or potential victims.
Was the Tylenol thing really corporate negligence? It was some unhinged murderer, and them or someone else was actually closer to a Kaczynski, sending out demand letters with murder threats.
Farcast is a seed-stage, venture-backed hard tech company seeking to eliminate the Impossible Mile in logistics by building precision air drop systems that can be deployed from manned cargo planes or drones. Recently closed round.
OP here - I was on the Stanford campus in 2016 and 2017, frequently riding my bike there. Never once saw a mask on a bike rider. Very little car traffic on the routes bicyclists regularly use to get around. Also a frequent bike rider in my new city of Dallas. Very rarely (if ever), have I seen a cyclist (even on roads) wear a mask. Very likely masks on the Stanford campus are in response to COVID.
It’s understandable that you wouldn’t see people wear masks on campus prior to COVID. Mainly because mask wearing outdoors was previously a rare event for any reason in the USA prior to COVID, so you’d stick out as making a statement if you were one of the few who did. But the normalization of wearing a mask outdoors now likely plays a contributing role towards people feeling comfortable about wearing masks for other reasons that aren’t as straightforward as ‘preventing COVID’.
I also did not wear a mask when biking before COVID. Now, having easy access to masks, I would rarely bike without one, if I am near traffic, because of the better air it provides. Fair point about lack of traffic on campus though.
