Ted Kaczynski as a relatively apolitical test case for cancellation norms:
Ted Kaczynski was a mathematics professor who decided that industrial society was terrible, and waged a terroristic bombing campaign to foment a revolution against technology. As part of this campaign, he wrote a manifesto titled "Industrial Society and Its Future" and said that if a major newspaper printed it verbatim he would desist from terrorism. He is currently serving eight life sentences in a "super-max" security prison in Colorado.
My understanding is that his manifesto (which, incidentally, has been updated and given a new title "Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How", the second edition of which was released this year) is lucid and thought-out. Here are some questions the answers to which are not obvious to me:
Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like "getting people to read X", and it doesn't look like they're doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each ... (read more)
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