> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation.

I don't know about mentioning that one.

He’s a seminal figure!

Now why'd you'd have to ejaculate that into the conversation?

Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love

https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...

Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.

I believe the remains of Asimov's literary legacy are probably managed by his daughter along with an agent. Presumably most of the money goes to her too, but I have no idea. In any case she always seemed nice enough.

So when Roman Polanski finally dies, all his works will be okay given they're managed by a non-offending descendant?

We'll see. Who knows. But at least the profits won't be benefiting the person directly committing the offenses, right? I won't say if that's good, but it's at least a bit better, right?

A number of his works are better than “okay,” today. You’re welcome to view that as a moral dilemma, or not.

Not a moral dilemma to me at all personally. I separate the works from the artist. However, I find the constant barrage of purity police from all sides to be the mass media equivalent of a large boil on my butt. The whinging about AI from the left is as annoying as the whinging about DEI from the right to me. And none of that will go anywhere towards reining in surveillance capitalism and our emerging panopticon.

However, I will give credit to Bernie Sanders for admitting he opposes datacenters because he doesn't feel he can hit the root cause in time so at least he's honest about it. Meanwhile, the top 0.01% continues to enjoy its bespoke 5000 or so pages of the tax code and buying politicians for pennies on the dollar of revenue each one creates for them with no end in sight. But at least we all know now that the late Marvin Minsky got a happy ending from one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex workers. I wonder how many more members of the Harvard and MIT faculty did.

This issue of separating the artist from his work is eternal and the comparison with some of these more contemporary issues you’re upset about rings a little hollow.

The issue of not wanting to give money to a (perceived to be) horrible person, or company, or cause seems somewhat valid to me, hence it does seem like there’s a distinction to be made between, for example, Asimov and Polanski. On the other hand, I might encourage the conflicted to question whether the fraction of a penny Polanski gets when somebody streams Chinatown really moves the needle…

If you really want to go down this rabbithole, listen to the victim's words:

https://deadline.com/2023/04/roman-polanski-rape-victim-sama...

If you have a monsters hunger you produce a angels worth of work to be "tolerated" by society that rightfully despises you?

Those don't seem like the best links, especially that Asimov one. Link inside the Asimov link tells a much better story, with consistent behavior.

  > Maybe you have to still be alive to matter?

This is certainly part of the equation. I mean there's a Michael Jackson movie now.

But another part is that someone's work is distinct from their other actions. It's definitely a tough situation and confusing line to draw. Michael Jackson without a doubt made great music. But that doesn't make up for his Epstein-esk escapades. Being dead at least creates some distance as he's not directly benefiting from the revenue streams, which is part of what empowered and even encouraged that behavior (power seems to do more than just corrupt).

  > What exactly are the rules here?

There aren't any. We're all just trying to figure it out. But if we didn't create some distinctions then the reality is that there would be no heroes. It's hard to find a notable man or woman from the past who can be considered blameless by today's standards. Though there are plenty who stood above the standards of their day. Maybe the best thing we can do is to remember that we're all human. We're more than our environments, but they do shape us. I think you can think of people as great in one domain but terrible in others. But this is much easier to do with people dead than those alive.

We're all confused. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It gets us to talk and figure it out. I certainly don't know what to do, but I'll at least recognize it isn't trivial. And I'll at least recognize that we're talking about men, not gods

> a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

> Can we move on?

Indeed, I'd like to propose we collectively meta 'move on' from always being required to restate the well-known moral, ethical, political, legal or inter-personal lapses of every notable artist, athlete, entertainer, scientist, writer, etc anytime they are mentioned, even in passing. Crazy... I know.

As you note, history is chock full of shitheads. If one looks carefully, it's certainly the vast majority of anyone very notable. So it would be far more efficient to assume they're all shitheads and instead only make special note of celebrating the rare outliers who weren't awful. If we all just assume the probable awfulness and take it as given, that would make it possible to mention whatever thing someone may have done that one year, in that one narrow professional domain, that may have been notable or slightly good - without evoking all the stupidest, worst mistakes and personal failures of their entire lives. Most humans have, at their worst moments, done some awful stupid shit they regret. But most of us are lucky enough to not also do something notable enough to have our lives and characters examined by the Internet.d

There is only ONE notable person who was a very well-known celebrity for many decades who actually WAS as close to a perfect fucking human as it gets: Mr. Fred Rogers. Please, please do not take this as a challenge to go digging through his high school yearbooks to find some stupidly offensive joke he made. I still need just ONE truly good person.

So let's all just agree that, aside from Fred Rogers, >90% of everyone else we've ever heard of was probably awful, stupid or terrible, at least at some points, on some things, to some people - even Mother Theresa (who didn't quite live long enough to avoid it). Some of their misdeeds became known in their own time (or they were lucky enough to die early, like JKF who escaped his Weinstein-esque treatment of Marylin and other women), and others were 'recontextualized' post mortem. For every other notable person still in the 'unaccused' column, it's a race between whether they are outed or forgotten first.

Ejaculate you say

Eww, I see what you did there

Right?! It would be nice if we had a centralized figure to hide me from such dangerous names and ideas, maybe have a blacklist!!

Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far.

And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.

When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.

I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists:

https://youtu.be/j9MubNsh3rs?si=wpG1YLDz_Y9cOECQ

I feel like I wasted 25 min watching that (at 2x).

If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:

   - Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
   - The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
   - Some presidents since have been populists

Then that's a weak argument.

... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.

You missed the education related points.

Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.

>I found it extremely entertaining.

Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.

Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".

It was a history of anti- intellectualism in the US. I'm not sure what kind of argument they should be making.

Let me nitpick the nitpick: we're in an attention economy and it's all to easy to have something salient dismissed with TLDR/TLDW. A more cursory glance that makes it easier to ease into a concept is more important than the subject matter expert making an ironclad argument that no one reads.

In the context of the internet forum, that was an appropriate video to post.

> I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.

Thanks for missing my point. Informative doesn't win over as many minds in this day and age. Staying principled in a land of grifts only gets you torn apart.

You're welcome.

I think she violates her own rules. It also doesn't help that the music gives that forbidding feeling and sense of disaster. Even if well intentioned she ends up doing the very thing she is criticizing. Emotion precedes analysis...

A good example of a problem in the video is she makes the strong claim (multiple times) that America was founded on anti-intellectualism. Even stronger, that it's the only one. She jumps from saying it was ingrained in the culture before the constitution, then talks about the founding fathers, and moves straight to "early 19th century" with the discussion of Jackson. Jackson was president from 1829-1837. She's playing a bit fast and loose with the timelines here. Importantly, by the 8 minute mark she's done supporting the claim but there's no strong evidence. Then she launches into more with the education system but it feels weird that she's stressing things like sitting in rows. Europe has... classrooms too.

That isn't to say that everything she says is hogwash. But I don't exactly buy that this was all planned and coordinated. There's much better explanations than a deep state. As George Carlin put it, you don't need a deep state when everyone in power goes to the same schools and hangs in the same social circles; they end up thinking alike. Bubbles, not coordinated action. This also adequately explains the dysfunction across the US education system where different regions have different styles and curriculum. It would sound silly to say that Europe was designed for dysfunction with France having a different curriculum than Germany. The US was highly federated and became more centralized. That fracturization perpetuated through to today. It's also easier to buy this explanation given the premise of dysfunction and lack of critical thinking.

The reality of it all is much more complex than she explains. Maybe she left that because it's hard to convey in a video and is less engaging (which would undermine what she's trying to teach). Or maybe she didn't do enough research (she is a self described polyglot. Though she also criticized polyglots).

Asimov wrote about it[0], and talked about it quite a bit.

So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".

There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego

[0] https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Rambling in the sense of not being well prepared, like he had an idea and some points to hit, but not a script. The content was good, for me.

Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.

The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)

>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.

Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.

You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.

And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

> I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life

"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"

(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)

People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.

Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.

And I can attribute something you enjoy today to a butterfly, flapping its wings on the shore of the Atlantic, seventeen years ago. People love to take a selective view of complex systems (for example, by picking only some nodes in the web of causality to call "attribution"), using biases like "relevance" and "significance" and "a non-omniscient positionality", and many especially love to call other views "ignorant" or "short-sighted".

That's true, you don't need to be a practitioner of science to live a modern and fulfilling life.

Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?

Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.

the contradiction is with the words - ethical:religion ~ modern:science.

ethics comes from religion. modernity comes from science.

if you say - "I don't need religion to tell me not to kill people"

then i say - "ok. so, why don't you go around killing people?"

you say - "i just don't have the desire to". or "i am compassionate"

i say - "ok. you do you. what about me? I wish to kill people. what's stopping me?"

you say - "consequences. police. law & order"

i say - "so if there was no police in a suburb, or no punishment for killing, I can kill people?"

Your argument falls dead.

Because religion tells us one thing - the law of Karma - there is no place or time in the universe where an action does not have a consequence. Regardless of your belief in God or the soul or spirit or afterlife or past lives.

Almost sounds like newton drew inspiration from the old golden rule - Treat others as you'd like to be treated.

Why? Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - you WILL be treated exactly as you treated others, whether in this life or the next. Ergo, if you don't want to be killed, don't kill. if you want to be killed, go ahead.

This is the way!

You need stories, preferable positive stories. Not those about endless wars and horrors, those stories work like a contraceptive. They are pure poison, no matter how true, scientific and educational.

I don't know how to say that you can have positive stories without believing in god without feeling like I'm arguing against a strawman. Can you please give me something with a little more substance?

Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.

The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.

If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

It's a strange christian sect that is generally atheistic but borrows values from the western tradition.

That's nothing to do with religion. It's just having values. You can have values without religion.

> it just means that it’s our religion to do them.

No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".

This is a strange definition of religion, to basically mean anything that isn't science. Are all aesthetics and ethics a matter of religion?

People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

People who don’t believe it are bad.

If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.

People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.

People think we should spread it to other people.

Functionally, how is that different from religion?

Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.

I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.

And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.

It's a good word to use because it has so much in common with western religious traditions.

This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html

You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.

> People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.

In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.

> If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science.

I'm always blown away by people who need religion to tell right from wrong.

Care to elaborate?

Then you define religion as information about a god. Other people define religion as metaphysical beliefs. Other people just define it as irrational staunch beliefs.

Like "don't use goto". That's religion.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

Religion and values are two different things. Human rights, universal equality, democracy are values, not religion.

They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.

The fact that a government that isn't derived from the will of the people is unstable and likely to be overthrown can be logically and empirically observed, but we can and should test different forms of democracy by experimentation and observation. We can and should test which rights should take precedence over others. Holding the particular rights encoded in the Bill of Rights as sacred is a fallacy rooted in the deification of America's founders. Ultimately, individuals are interested in their own survival and should rationally build societal structures that serve that goal.

The foundation of human rights, universal equality, & democracy is empathy, which is basically a peer-reviewed scientific theory at a personal level that those with similar capabilities to you deserve equal respect ...or else, violence.

How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?

there is a specific, very modern strain of mostly anglosphere protestant christian religion that can hinder intellectual progress. When I say "very modern" I mean within the last 2-300 years. Most of intellectual history in post-Roman Europe is linked to religious institutions. countless philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were clergy or members of religious orders.

The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.

(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")

I’m sharing this because you may not be aware yet…

Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.

Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.

Downvoting won’t hide the truth.

Y’all are welcome to offer a counterpoint, and yet…

A glance at Wikipedia shows that this is somewhere between misleading overstatement and gross hyperbole, and under contention besides.

It was in the DOJ releases

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000221...

Is there much direct evidence of sexual misconduct vs just influence peddling?

FWIW, I found:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

An interesting listen on this world (which I assume goes way beyond Epstein (sans sex trafficking) in elite circles) of favors, status seeking and influence peddling between cultural, academic, political and financial elites.

Yes https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000221...

There are graphic descriptions in Virginia Giuffre’s diary entries as well.