[HN Gopher] Marshall Brain has died
___________________________________________________________________
Marshall Brain has died
Author : bsagdiyev
Score : 257 points
Date : 2024-11-24 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wral.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wral.com)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people
| have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It
| makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much
| found themselves in that place.
|
| Dang - deserves a black bar?
| lwhalen wrote:
| He was also the author of https://marshallbrain.com/manna, a sci-
| fi story that has stuck with me for years.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Very relevant in the age of smart glasses for workers.
| chgs wrote:
| I was think about the software some companies use to "monitor
| productivity"
| raphman wrote:
| Duplicate (different submitted link, however):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387
| monocasa wrote:
| I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that
| had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient
| speculative fiction I've read.
|
| Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future
|
| He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very
| similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a
| replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as
| well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized
| social credit system.
|
| The other society uses the similar technology not as a social
| class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of
| their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I
| will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the
| utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy
| technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at
| all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power
| structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and
| biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an
| asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a
| sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and
| human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and
| eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the
| galaxy.
| monocasa wrote:
| Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Well for starters having the technology for prefect
| recycling.
| monocasa wrote:
| I interpreted it had perfect enough for their goals
| rather than breaking any thermodynamic laws or something.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| They have some chips they insert into your spine to read
| your thoughts and other similar stuff.
|
| But personally the "dystopia" to me feels very much like
| something we could end up with -it's much more a warning.
| Meanwhile the fantastic nature of the utopia doesn't really
| matter in contrast, because the idea of sharing society's
| abundance with everyone is clearly possible.
| darepublic wrote:
| It's possible if we believe human nature to be
| sufficiently malleable. Why can't we all just get along.
| Perhaps the mountains that need to be moved for such a
| thing are as daunting as some of the physical laws we try
| to hurdle instead
| vineyardmike wrote:
| There are nations and societies very different from the
| United States. In the United States, we can see the
| distrust in our neighbors play out politically,
| contrasted with other societies trust. You can even see
| it play out across various states and regions. Perhaps
| they're not mountains imposed by human nature, but our
| perception of society.
|
| Other nations have socialized healthcare, where anyone
| can be treated. Other nations have calm safe and clean
| public transit. Other nation's redistribute wealth and
| provide strong safety nets. Other nations don't have mass
| violence. Other nations guarantee retirement and
| pensions. Other nations trust their governments.
|
| The fantasy physics aren't what's holding people back.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > the idea of sharing society's abundance with everyone
| is clearly possible
|
| It is possible. If we stopped at the invention of fire
| we'd all have equality by now. The problem is that people
| keep inventing new stuff.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Why is innovation and sharing mutually exclusive?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They aren't. But for full sharing to occur every time you
| invented anything you'd have to stop inventing until the
| population of the world had one.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The hairless apes that are in charge have a very long and
| consistent history of power abuse.
|
| [spoiler alert]
|
| Everyone has a remote kill switch in their spinal cord.
| Once the goverment decides to be evil, any rebel will get
| their legs instructed to walk to a pea facility for
| "reeducation".
|
| Compared to this scenario, 1984 is almost as optimistic as
| Equilibrium.
| monocasa wrote:
| Which is why there wasn't really a set of hairless apes
| that were in charge. They had a fully direct democracy.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Accelerando
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The only clear distinction between the utopia and the
| dystopia is on wealth distribution.
|
| All the rest of it is a narrative about consequences.
|
| Anyway, the AI there isn't like our LLMs either. It's an AGI
| capable of long term societal prediction.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The only clear distinction between the utopia and the
| dystopia is on wealth distribution.
|
| A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where
| some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has
| basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed?
| Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline
| of what most people have available to them.
| norir wrote:
| In that hypothetical world, I am quite sure that people
| would adapt to their improved material conditions and
| still become resentful at wealth inequality. A lesser
| version of this already exists in the US. Go to a
| relatively poor US community and it is almost
| unimaginably wealthy compared to past generations and
| other places in the world.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The line that people have it so much better than previous
| generations or other countries is almost always aimed at
| the lower ranks of society. Nobody tells the billionaires
| how good they have it.
| benreesman wrote:
| Inequality is destructive because it creates upwards
| pressure on real asset prices, with housing probably
| being the best example, which creates _downward_ pressure
| on the real standard of living at the median.
|
| Most of the developed world is going through one version
| or another of this _right now_. Housing cost crises
| everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are
| far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with
| the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth
| distribution to be "because we need to build more
| housing". By all means build more housing, but if we keep
| redistributing all wealth upwards constantly that new
| housing will become expensive AirBnBs and shit, not homes
| owned by people at the median.
|
| The idea that the person at the median is doing as well
| as they were ten years ago is a weird religion, the idea
| that they're doing as well as their parents is a cult.
|
| Inequality is bad because the basic essentials for the
| person at the median are some of the best investments for
| the people at the top.
| chgs wrote:
| Which utopia? I saw two dystopias. One the likely future of
| western society, another being one where your very thoughts
| are programmed
| verisimi wrote:
| Do you think that this is not already the case? If not,
| what was the point of 15+ years of government education?
| tomrod wrote:
| Red herring, I think. There are many goals for education
| outcomes, some noble and some base.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think
| Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities
| certainly imply that it's Turing Complete.
|
| Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-
| mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they
| couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.
|
| This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that
| doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one
| set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if
| Manna started becoming very buggy.
|
| On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete
| though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though
| I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a
| Manna.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I found it to be an extremely interesting and useful tool to
| understand and imagine the impact of wealth distribution and
| automation in society. Personally, I believe in strong
| redistribution in society, because (at least in America) we
| largely live in a world of abundance, and automation should
| make everyone's lives easier and more leisurely.
|
| But I would like to point out that the "utopia" has a few
| serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as
| though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are
| predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to
| the extreme...
|
| > Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric
| grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global
| terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows
| incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending
| anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone's career, or
| if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you
| are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse.
| In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is
| logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else's home. If
| someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that
| fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so
| on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to
| commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime.
| Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and
| disciplined."
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels
| to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without
| knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly
| amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that
| invention would take.
| bckr wrote:
| Oh, this is very sad. I was really inspired by his essays and
| stories when I was 17.
|
| I wonder what was happening with him.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| > Marshall Brain died inside his office Wednesday on N.C.
| State's centennial campus.
|
| >While the university would not confirm any details related to
| his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide.
|
| :(
|
| Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as
| /r/collapse.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/
|
| I don't think it's hard to see what things concerned him. I
| think it's important for all of us to realize that no matter
| how we think the world is going there is still brightness in
| the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through
| his contributions to society.
| bckr wrote:
| I wondered. How dark.
| FlynnCruse wrote:
| Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly
| heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and
| kids, the best through this tragic period.
|
| He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students,
| incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering.
| My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by
| Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to
| spend with him.
|
| Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.
| panoply220 wrote:
| Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful
| for the time we got to spend together.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his
| website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a
| bit regarding the direction of society.
| schiffern wrote:
| I noticed that. He made several subreddits, here's a (likely
| incomplete) list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224139
|
| His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
|
| An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace,
| Marshall Brain.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Do you have an approximate time point for that comment?
|
| Brain makes a comment beginning at about the 30 minute point,
| I'm listening to that now, though it doesn't seem to match
| your description.
|
| The bit a couple of minutes later (32m) beginning "I have
| four children now in college..." seems closer.
|
| I have to comment that the song about how bright the future
| was (by Timbuk3) was absolutely satiric and ironic, though
| that point is often missed. As is often the case, in music
| and otherwise (Beastie Boys "Fight for your Right", Bruce
| Springstein "Born in the USA", Neal Stephenson _Snow Crash_ &
| the Metaverse, etc., etc.).
| schiffern wrote:
| I hesitated to use a direct timecode link, because I feel
| the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought.
| But if you insist, and if I'm not limited to quotations
| "near the end," then...
|
| @8:10 "Is Elon Musk going to be the commander of Mars? He
| just by dictate decides, abortion or no abortion? How do
| you figure that out?"
|
| @12:20: (on climate change) "We know we have to do
| something, but how do you get an entire planet of people to
| decide on a direction and start doing it together? We have
| terrible examples of it, like WWII, where the entire planet
| marched to destroy each-other. It was horrible! Think how
| much time and effort and people and materials got spun up
| for WWII. If we can do that for climate change, climate
| change would be done! It would be well on its way to being
| better than it is now, where we're just on a path to doom
| essentially."
|
| @14:30 (asked about Manna) "We would have hoped that we
| would have somehow gotten enlightened -- I don't want to go
| political here, but -- you gotta look back on the past five
| years and just wonder, 'what the heck happened?' The
| dystopian side of it seems right on target, right on track
| for... something. Because people are just getting poorer
| and poorer in the United States. The body politic is just
| getting crushed, and you would like there to be a better
| way. I don't have a great..."
|
| @16:50: "The problem with privacy is that you end up with a
| whole bunch of people storming the Capitol of the United
| States, and you have to do this enormous amount of work to
| figure out who they were, and some of them you don't even
| know now. I don't think they caught even half the people,
| and very few of the people at the upper echelons, it's
| undetermined, but it's likely they're all gonna escape.
| Because they're able to do stuff, they're able to hide --
| right now we're seeing all this stuff about people erasing
| their text messages in the Secret Service, and now in the
| Department of Defense, and now you get what happen on the
| internet where these anonymous trolls are just coming out
| of nowhere and saying whatever they want even if it's not
| true, and you get bots on -- I don't know what the
| percentage is, but let's say half of Twitter is not even
| people. All of that gets eliminated if it's all non-
| anonymous."
|
| (and now, we get to the parts I was thinking about in my
| original post)
|
| @24:18: "The blessing and the curse of that [Doomsday] book
| is that it's so depressing. Imagine writing it! ... It
| still effects me today.
|
| Having gone that deep on that many topics is hard. But what
| I'm doing now is writing about climate change. That's just
| a little part of the doomsday book. And it's so hard,
| because we're looking at an apocalypse possibility here if
| we don't change. How do you get all of humanity to change
| -- you mention the profit motive -- in the context of giant
| corporations who don't want to change, and have 1,000
| reasons not to? Climate change is a hard thing"
|
| @28:14 "this week, there is so much bad news on the climate
| front, it is really... if you're paying attention it is
| really hard to see how bad off we are."
|
| @30:00 (on causes for optimism) "[long pause] Well if
| you're in the United States, Kansas voted yesterday... to
| protect abortion in Kansas. And if you look at all the
| states around Kansas, they're all now locking down. So if
| you're in favor of abortion being a right that women have
| in their reproductive space, then that was a tiny bit of
| good news. A fundamental right was taken away from women by
| the Supreme Court, and that was a tiny victory. It showed
| that you could get people out to think about things in a
| rational way. I found that vote yesterday uplifting.
|
| If I sat here long enough I could probably think of some
| others, but that's the first thing that comes to mind.
| There's just so much awful stuff!!"
|
| @32:05: "I have four children who are all in college. And I
| teach in a university, I have 100 students a semester say.
| And I know them, I interview all my students. It is hard to
| grow up in a society with this much stuff roiling around.
|
| This absolutely was not part of my college experience. The
| future looked bright! There was even a song about how
| bright the future looked!
|
| College now and college then are on different planets.
| There's so much stuff our 20 year olds are thinking about.
| You just rattled off a list, from the economy to jobs to
| the climate to fundamental rights to will we even have a
| democracy in America in two years?
|
| And you either embrace it -- like, I got my both arms
| wrapped around it trying to see the whole picture -- or you
| just turn off. You know, don't watch the news."
|
| Sad to see the darkness take such a bright light. We should
| all try to hold something of Marshall Brain within
| ourselves.
| willio58 wrote:
| Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn't translate to
| happiness.
|
| The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my
| life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast
| but no longer owned by How stuff works.
|
| I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of
| downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod,
| repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK
| coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode
| religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "success doesn't translate to happiness."
|
| I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture,
| leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of
| failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic
| athletes)
| nisten wrote:
| Spent hours in highschool printing stuff out of howstuffworks.com
| because dialup at home was too slow until we got dsl :(
|
| May he rest in peace.
| gothink wrote:
| Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the
| influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick
| story:
|
| My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities
| website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in
| 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a
| resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering
| struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing
| my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only
| did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she
| continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to
| this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that
| positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it.
| It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years
| ago.
|
| I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created
| and the impact they had.
| schiffern wrote:
| Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s
| era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
| bn-l wrote:
| This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
| ilayn wrote:
| Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from
| the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone
| (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about
| computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually
| got me going about how HTML works.
|
| I still remember their animations about car differential which
| were magical.
| yarg wrote:
| As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I
| absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".
|
| If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and
| any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all
| (especially not those still living in that hole).
|
| I would much rather have it framed as me having done something
| unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society
| we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to
| acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there;
| that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it
| was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did
| nothing to prevent.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite
| beliefs.
|
| Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't
| stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a
| disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from
| cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital
| functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
|
| For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental
| illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It
| was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of
| my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts,
| but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies
| towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to
| treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person
| with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the
| things that trigger my own chronic depression.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032
| opello wrote:
| I found the linked, and subsequently linked, posts very
| insightful, and entirely relatable, thank you.
| yrral wrote:
| Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was
| my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various
| things work (there were many hundreds).
|
| I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand
| how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind.
| I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing
| things to this website.
|
| Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and
| expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday
| and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the
| same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a
| content mill.
|
| Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your
| contributions to my (and likely others) life
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Loved that website. Its intro to C programming was how I got
| into programming.
| slaucon wrote:
| I had the same experience, as I'm sure many others did. It's
| easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality
| and engaging educational content on the internet back then.
| Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things,
| and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time
| as a kid.
| goodmunky wrote:
| He was 63 and wrote this a few years ago, "You've Had Your Turn
| -The Case for Euthanizing Everyone at Age 65"
| https://marshallbrain.com/youve-had-your-turn-the-case-for-e...
| Horffupolde wrote:
| What happens with domains, content, etc now? Is there a
| systematic way of preparing and securing online services for
| death?
| xyst wrote:
| archive.org|.ph
| panoply220 wrote:
| I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time
| revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a
| catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
| StephenSmith wrote:
| I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship
| professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what
| they could do with their lives.
|
| I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result
| of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human
| being. This news is tragic.
|
| RIP Marshall. You were loved.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program
| more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a
| professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to
| me.
|
| He will be dearly missed.
| joemazerino wrote:
| Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He
| seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament
| to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
| las_balas_tres wrote:
| What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ
| possibly have?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Bit premature to use the e word. You don't know what he was
| going through, what his medical status was, or even have
| certainty how he died.
|
| And all of us, even the von Neumanns and the Ramanujans, have
| restraints and guard rails.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| If it weren't for howstuffworks, I suspect I wouldn't be an
| engineer. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Rip Marshall.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This is so sad, I loved this man. I wonder if the current
| dystopian road the US is going down had anything to do with it.
| Rest in peace, Marshall.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Can't help but feel he got screwed when the HowStuffWorks website
| was sold for 250x what he got just a few years earlier.
|
| Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely
| good and my first introduction to Windows programming.
|
| It's our loss to loose such a talented human being.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Hey that's how I learned C
|
| RIP
| slfnflctd wrote:
| A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple
| comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna'
| story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely
| knocked my socks off.
|
| Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one
| of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees"
| (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my
| world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or
| theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized
| several points I still consider hugely significant.
|
| For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who
| continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a
| direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things
| you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the
| root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact
| that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their
| supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would
| consider honest amongst each other.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak
| well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions
| than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly
| confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is,
| about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is.
|
| In the words of the Bible, " the light has come into the world,
| and people loved the darkness rather than the light because
| their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things
| hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works
| should be exposed. ..." meaning his guide will only take him to
| further darkness and misguidance.
| skulk wrote:
| > And each of those questions comes from a highly confused
| state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about
| what God is.
|
| No need for goalpost moving. The holy book claims that God
| answers prayers. This is, in fact, a lie. Some people aren't
| yet fully convinced of this, and reading the website helps
| them along. (see uncle comments)
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| No higher power ever wrote anything though. That's all human
| writing, human promises, human propaganda.
| norir wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own
| unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or
| writing.
| cogman10 wrote:
| What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that
| does weird stuff.
|
| Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that
| complexity.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope
| someone mirrors it.
|
| It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html)
| which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation
| as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly
| assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially
| argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so
| mean.
|
| While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another
| page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an
| 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe
| in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and
| atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I
| think they had some _excellent_ points about how the religious
| point of view is treated as the default in public discourse -
| and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments _for_
| religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected
| and ordinary, while arguments _against_ religion are seen as
| inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
| norir wrote:
| This is an extreme dichotomy between fundamentalists and new
| atheists. I personally believe that both worldviews are wrong
| and inconsistent with lived reality.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or
| theological treatise you've ever encountered
|
| It's worse than that, it's bad theology on a topic that has
| been discussed for millennia.
| ziofill wrote:
| Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on
| howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home
| page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
| zackangelo wrote:
| So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I
| couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on
| my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the
| service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to
| an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to
| love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles
| was exactly what I needed at that time to get started.
|
| RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
| dodongobongo wrote:
| Marshall taught one of my classes at NCSU when I was there ten
| years ago. He was a little eccentric but super nice. I remember
| that he said if we made a website, the "natural exploratory
| pressures" of the internet would find it, so all we had to do was
| have good content. I wonder how much of that still holds, but
| it's a good memory. Hope his family finds peace.
| mulhoon wrote:
| TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo from reading
| about Marshall.
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