Letter from Unabomber to Dr. David Gelernter (1995)

http://www.montanaheritageproject.org/edheritage/1910/unabomber.htm

by nafey • 9 years ago

81 84 9 years ago

aluhut5• 9 years ago

There is an interesting documentary about Kaczynski and the philosophy behind him by Lutz Dammbeck called "The Net": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E Featuring a pretty pissed David among others.

pmarreck7• 9 years ago

It looks like the Unabomber's fears have come true... and surprise, we're still mostly OK!

onion2k• 9 years ago

we're still mostly OK

There are a lot of people who are definitely not OK. Arguably the majority of people live in a state of at least uncertainty about their future, if not outright fear for their security and safety. This is true at both a local and a global scale.

kps• 9 years ago

We're down to just a majority, from pretty much everybody for pretty much all of human existence. Good work, folks! Let's not stop now.

pmarreck7• 9 years ago

Arguably the majority of people live in a state of at least uncertainty about their future, if not outright fear for their security and safety. This is true at both a local and a global scale.

I think that this has always been the case? Do you have evidence that this has grown significantly (and not in a way that has simply been fueled by eyeball-grabbing FUD from news organizations?)

paulvs• 9 years ago

If the Unabomber had been smart enough he would have realized that these fears are actually contemplated by others and regarded as known risks.

icebraining4• 9 years ago

Why do you say he didn't realize? Maybe he just thought those others didn't give enough weight to those risks?

foxhop• 9 years ago

If you read his manifesto it goes much deeper into his thought process. There are also quite a few documentaries out there that give more insight into how he gets caught.

mynameishere• 9 years ago

It's astonishing, the seriousness with which the media takes a terrorist's opinions, if that terrorist has the correct politics.

throwanem9• 9 years ago

Of which mainstream American media organization am I to believe radical anarchoprimitivism is the secret agenda?

eli_gottlieb3• 9 years ago

Well, most mainstream media organizations actually do have a deeply reactionary attitude towards technology and a deeply naively optimistic view towards Nature, in fact routinely committing the naturalistic fallacy... so... almost all of them, on some level?

timwaagh4• 9 years ago

i flagged this because its essentially terrorist propaganda because of what the guy did. i dont know what the guidelines are regarding such things but i don't think this belongs in a civil place like this.

aluhut5• 9 years ago

So his ideas could radicalize us here? Is this what you think? Like ISIS propaganda?

He did math too. Do you want to ban math here also?

timwaagh4• 9 years ago

terrorism is sort of like speading your ideas by inflicting violence to make headlines. i would not want such tactics to be rewarded in any way. i believe in arguing for your ideas without the use of violence to 'market' them. I would not like to endorse a math publication written by a terrorist. but in addition, this document explicitly references the violence he inflicted on his victim.

michaelt• 9 years ago

I believe the fear is giving attention to people who do things we don't like is a reward, creating bad incentives.

Same reason suicide charities discourage newspapers from reporting the contents of suicide notes.

josinalvo2• 9 years ago

The argument is that we should not reward terrorism or further incentivise it.

If you want to discuss this "math" of yours, bring it from a source that does not amplify the signal by killing people.

throwanem9• 9 years ago

I don't think it is necessary for us to behave as though we fear ideas. Erroneous though some certainly are, I confide that we can recognize and say as much.

timwaagh4• 9 years ago

its not about the ideas. i dont have a problem with his ideas, i have a problem with how he goes about spreading them. that's why we should not allow this.

petard• 9 years ago

every time somebody uses the word 'terrorist' a kitten dies

wybiral3• 9 years ago

While I understand the intent of your comment, it's bothersome to think that we can't have a discussion about something purely because some murderer said it once.

That aside, I think he seems to overly doubt the inevitability, which is to completely ignore the fact that if we didn't create these systems then someone else would.

Even if you believe that they're dangerous or harmful (inherently), there's some game theory involved in not having created them in the same way as not having designed the h-bomb when we did. Because another potential world power will and that seems hard to dismiss.

icebraining4• 9 years ago

Playing Devil's advocate, we could discuss the ideas using some other sources. Anarcho-primitivism is older than Kaczynski's writings.

lmm• 9 years ago

While I understand the intent of your comment, it's bothersome to think that we can't have a discussion about something purely because some murderer said it once.

No, the article is specifically a letter written by a mass-murderer. The objection is not that the ideas are the same, it's that this is literally what the killer wrote.

tmnvix• 9 years ago

...its essentially terrorist propaganda because of what the guy did.

Your argument is invalid.

Of course, that doesn't mean I disagree with your conclusion.

throwanem9• 9 years ago

This is the second time in recent days that Kaczynski's writings have been the subject of HN discussion. Rather than rehearse what I had to say then, I'll just link it: https://aaron-m.com/2017/07/09/on-kaczynski

arnioxux• 9 years ago

Taking "technology" to its logical end, you will probably arrive at AGI. And despite being decades off away from it, there are already many people making sure that it will be "safe" since the default otherwise will most likely lead to human extinction.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

EDIT: I am getting a lot of downvotes for this comment. And just to clear up intention, all I am trying to say here is that yes, technology could be deleterious but we can prevent it in ways other than concluding “and that’s why we have to start blowing shit up and killing people”. I don't see why that's offensive.

throwanem9• 9 years ago

I think it's very optimistic to imagine that we're only decades away from inventing God! But I'm also glad there are people taking the time to consider how we might do so without too gravely regrettable a result.

throwanem9• 9 years ago

Singularitarianism tends to polarize opinion here, I think, in ways that tend to find stronger expression via the voting buttons than the reply option. I wouldn't worry too hard about it.

eli_gottlieb3• 9 years ago

I know I'm revoking it by commenting here, but I did give you a downvote. It wasn't that you said something ridiculous. It was that you started from Kacyznksi and segued into a topic that's only tangentially related.

ryanackley• 9 years ago

Part of what we see as "human intelligence" comes from our biological origins. For example, intelligence AND emotions drive our actions: ambition, empathy, fear, greed, jealousy, love, etc. They are survival and reproductive mechanisms built into our brains based on the human condition.

My response to the theory that an all-powerful computer intelligence will one day have us at it's whim is why would it even care? For the same reason it lacks empathy, it would also lack any ambition or fear or jealousy.

The bigger risk is relying too much on A.I. built for very specific purposes (ANI). A contrived example would be putting A.I. in charge of managing the nuclear arsenal. A bug in the A.I. that caused a pre-emptive strike could wipe out all life on earth.

Zigurd• 9 years ago

I'm not smart enough to dismiss cautions that AGI will lead to human extinction, but many of the arguments I have seen, including Bostrom's, don't adequately explain that AIs are not life, and therefore do not compete for resource the way life does. That is, an AGI will not be alive, but neither can it die. It doesn't have genes, and it will not have evolved to propagate genes competitively.

So, while it's possible that AGI will be as bad or worse than competing with a more powerful and intelligent species of animal, they're not animals, and probably won't behave like animals. Increasing chimp intelligence, on the other hand, is probably not a good idea. Bonobos, maybe. Not chimps.

Also missing from the discussion is that intelligence isn't the only danger from competitors for resources. Insects collectively weigh a multiple of the total human biomass and many of them would eat us all, given half a chance. Microbes could evolve to kill us all, directly, or by modifying the ecosystem.

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

What most people don't know is that the US government experimented on him at the age of ~16 when he was a math undergrad at Harvard in project artichoke offshoot MK Ultra.

JohnStrange• 9 years ago

Do you have a reference for that?

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

This is what he's referring to:

In his sophomore year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a personality assessment study that was conducted by Harvard psychologists and led by Henry Murray. Students in Murray's study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they were subjected to "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks in a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment".[28] During the test, students were taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each student had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations: the essays were turned over to an anonymous attorney, who would enter the room and individually belittle each student based in part on the disclosures they had made. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to author Alston Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began, and Kaczynski's lawyers attributed his deep-seated hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in this study.[28] Furthermore, some have suggested that this experience may have been instrumental in Kaczynski's future actions.[29][30]

Dunno about all the mkultra stuff, but they psychologically abused the hell out of a 17 year-old kid.

mannykannot2• 9 years ago

For more information: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

paulie_a• 9 years ago

I read his manifesto in middle school because it had just came out in the papers. Previously I thought it was incredibly repetitive to disguise the simplistic ideas. Reading this I change that opinion, he was an angry "loser" with delusions of his own intellect that overcompensates with a lot of words.

celticninja• 9 years ago

Perhaps you should look at how he became what he became, the CIA and the MKULTRA project were probably a huge factor in the creation of his persona. So calling him a loser is probably an unfair assessment.

Jtsummers• 9 years ago

Calling him a loser also means largely discarding anything he says without any consideration. The fact is, we've done that with large classes of people (in every country, in every time) who feel that the "current" (whatever it is at the time) system or progress is harming them. Eventually, they boil over to become either the majority or mobilized minority army and we have chaos in a country, region, or globally.

This letter speaks rather directly to our contemporary issue of technology displacing non-degreed workers. Either by exporting the jobs (cheaper transport, better logistics), eliminating or reducing the number of people required (increased automation), or increasing the technical sophistication required (again, automation but also increasing presence of computer systems and more complex tooling). It's pretty obvious in the present discussions (and the most recent US presidential election) that people are feeling a great deal of fear and hardship because of our direction over the past 30-40 years (in particular). We have to confront these issues. Otherwise, a lack of consideration or deliberation (publicly) is a tacit endorsement of the current direction and its negative effects on large blocks of our fellow humans and citizens.

oliveshell• 9 years ago

It really is a sad and fascinating story. For those who don't know and are curious:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

XiaomiFan• 9 years ago

How is the youngest full professor in mathematics at Berkeley a loser in any sense if the word?

The man is clearly mentally disturbed and needed medical care, but that in no sense should dimish his academic accomplishments and raw intelligence.

abiox6• 9 years ago

he's a terrorist and a murderer. whether he won a genetic lotto is pretty much irrelevant.

pmarreck7• 9 years ago

Rational arguments against his ideas will be more successful than ad-hominem arguments against his ideas.

I am not defending a terrorist so much as espousing a better communication of ideas.

snikeris• 9 years ago

"You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it."

- Wendell Barry

Not saying I approve of bombing people, but we owe much progress to nonconformist losers.

wolfgke• 9 years ago

The German director Lutz Dammbeck made an interesting documentary "Das Netz" (the net) about strange parallels in the development of the internet, the counterculture and the terrorist attacks of the Unabomber:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Netz

irln• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm cynical but does a connection exist between sudden renewed interest in Kacynski and a discovery channel docudrama being released?

someguydave• 9 years ago

Advertising? In my HN feed? Say it ain't so!

kodt• 9 years ago

Of course, seeing commercials brings him to front of mind. Is Discovery behind the posts? Could be, on reddit I would have no doubts.

crb002• 9 years ago

I would like to see Kaczynski and Manson appear by Snowdenbot for a roundtable. Both share dystopian views that inspired them to violent tragedy. I'm curious what their thoughts are on legislation to address regulation of genetic engineering etc.

abiox6• 9 years ago

snowdenbot?

eliwjones• 9 years ago

Doesn't anyone remember that it's "UNABOMer"?

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

Doesn't anyone remember that it's "UNABOMer"?

No, the FBI investigation was named “UNABOM”, the popular media name assigned to the perpetrator before he was identified, inspired by that, was “Unabomber”.

“UNABOMer” seems to be an attempt to preserve the sound of the latter while making it more consistent with the former, but is historically inaccurate.

abiox6• 9 years ago

i presumed this would be something at least... quasi-intellectual, but this is just a slimy letter from a terrorist harassing a (soon to be?) victim.

kind of gross.

Letter from Unabomber to Dr. David Gelernter (1995)

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