[sam2426679]

> 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.'

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

(He was 17 years old during his second year at Harvard).

[themaninthedark]

I find it very interesting that the news covering his life neglects to mention the MKULTRA part...

[sbuk]

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.

[lelanthran]

>> 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.

[hutzlibu]

"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.

And understand why they got there.

[lelanthran]

>> "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?

No, I did not. That's you reading something that was never said.

My point is that you cannot say, as you are saying right now, that there is always an environmental reason for why someone is the way they are.

That certainly isn't true. What I've found is that people who go looking for an environmental reason always find one!

What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!

[hutzlibu]

"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?

[kergonath]

> “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.

[lelanthran]

> 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.

[kergonath]

> 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.

[bondarchuk]

>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.