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.
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.
This is an extreme dichotomy between fundamentalists and new atheists. I personally believe that both worldviews are wrong and inconsistent with lived reality.
It's blatantly untrue to conclude that when we are largely ignorant of the detailed workings of the brain and of the universe at large, and ultimately unscientific, using Popper's falsifiability principle.
If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or denied in existence. It is ultimately a matter of faith, or another axiomatic belief, in how you ascribe labels to that which you can't scientifically explain.
So it could be that a "prophetic dream" you experienced one night is truly a sign from a higher power. Or it could be garbled nonsense from electrochemical reactions. You are not allowed to know. If you received authoritative evidence one way, you'd have to verify that the evidence stems from reality, and from there it's a recursive loop.
Yeah, that works. There's someone I know who picked up religion as an adult, and what everyone else sees as his subconscious, he himself thinks is literally the world of god.
Münchhausen trilemma makes it impossible to argue that point either way.
Interesting website. But there's one rationalization missing, imho: that God alters the timeline. That is, amputees are in fact healed in response to prayer, but nobody knows about it because God goes back in time and ensures the amputation never happened in the first place.
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.
> 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)
The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask".
What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" that I'm sure is an SMBC comic but cannot find easily on Google right now — if I had even once had such a clear and obvious statement ringing in my ears when I went through a Catholic school, I wouldn't have switched to Wicca before giving up on religion entirely.
(Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).
* Almost all such people, at least. Just as the number of people who claim to be able to physically shape-shift into werewolves is very small but not zero (guess how to join the dots between me knowing this and having had an interest in Wicca), the number is small enough that… other… causes are more plausible than the divine.
I think you overlook that holy book says “only” God answers prayers. And pray to God for he will answer. The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be the answer you think is correct.
A leg amputated is a leg lost and the journey of a test and struggle that begins next. That’s an answer. Not a lie.
Once again, the writer doesn’t understand God, prayer, religion, and the purpose of man. And he cannot make sense out of this paradigm. So he falls further into misguidance, like a schoolboy who misses the primary instructions only to reject the class entirely.
I've studied a fair amount theology, it was my original college major. I am aware of this.
The most salient point he made as far as I'm concerned is that there are very specific claims made throughout the Bible and other Christian literature about what exactly prayer does-- and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false.
I am not opposed to people praying, and in fact wholeheartedly support it in many cases. What I am opposed to is making unreasonable assertions about what is happening when someone prays, and what kinds of results are to be expected.
> there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false
Most, but not all, of these claims are, theologically, untestable.
Here's an analogy: Would you find a guy walking down the street, ask him to take part in your science experiment measuring how high guys can jump, hear him say "no I don't want to take part", then conclude that because he did not jump for you he is unable to jump? You wouldn't. In fact, you might get disciplined by your university's ethics review board for experimentation without consent. In the same way, for most tests, the Bible says that God does not want to be tested. You should assume that your unwilling test subject will not cooperate, or even work to frustrate, your tests.
The talk about observations over longer times can seem persuasive. I think an analog would be hiring a PI to tail the unwilling guy test subject for years. But if you don't see him jump in 5 years, does that mean he can't? What more if he knows you're following him and that you want to see him jump, is years of not jumping valid evidence then? That's not evidence at all, much less overwhelming evidence.
As an agnostic, this is a topic that greatly interests me.
One challenge I've found in navigating this is determining the extent to which (interpretation from an untrained but intelligent layperson) == (interpretation from someone with a lot more historical, linguistic, and theological training).
I.e., how much research is needed before one can reasonably conclude that the "promise" being evaluated isn't just a straw man.
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.
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.
> 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.
The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich.
None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the oligarchs waste money employing human wage slaves when the machines would always be cheaper than slaves?
Writer's conceipt - a good story needs suffering. The oligarchs might need some human assistance with, for example, software engineering to operate parts of their vast holdings. Note that in the original Manna there were still some human workers - lawyers, at least. Even if it was just 1% of the population, that's a significant number. Note also that the POV character was generally unaware of the wider state of the dystopia, and so were we, the reader.
The workers supply not only the drama of suffering but also a (meagre, absurd) customer base for the fast food restaurants themselves.
Last but not least, given the long distances involved in interstellar travel, an oligarch must delegate their authority, either to a machine, a human, or a combination, and that is an opportunity for some drama as experience and vision inevitably diverge. This would be true even if, for example, the delegate is a perfect clone of the oligarch. It would be within these cracks and crevices hope could form, only to be crushed, in artistic, brutal fashion.
> 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.
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.
That is not the shape of the world in the story under discussion.
Within the story, the dystopia crams the masses into cheap housing, they have no jobs nor possibility of jobs, no freedom even to leave as they are apprehended by robots if they try; and the utopia has no need for jobs, but gives out UBI credits to be spent on whatever you want the machines to make for you, and lets you live out a fantasy life.
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.
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.
Inability to save, class immobility, and insecurity of both food and housing are identical problems regardless of whether smartphones have been invented. It's telling who, specifically, advances claims about the notional fabulous wealth of the impoverished in the US.
In any case the assertion that poor communities are in any way better off than their predecessors is only accurate if you push you compare cohorts ~80 years or more apart. After the advent of social safety net programs in the US the working poor were (at least for a time) significantly more able to eventually join the middle class. Modern limitations on earnings and savings that have been applied to these programs has provably reduced this kind of class mobility.
Additionally, the combination of hyperconcentration of wealth, deregulation, and globalized trade have all played a part in the near total elimination of economic opportunity in rural communities.
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.
Almost everything* is accidentally Turing complete — I know the guy who proved that Magic the Gathering is Turing complete, even helped play-test and then bought a copy of his board game.
So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.
But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.
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.
Who selects the questions people vote? What happens when they get something like this in the screen in the middle of a football match:
> We have preliminary evidence that XYZ is a terrorist and we are sending him to a nice special house with a swimming pool to protect everyone until the investigation finishes. [OK] [Ask me later]
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.
Is that genuinely what you think sharing means? Everyone everywhere has everything? Obviously that’s not the case. And even if it was, why can’t independent inventors create thing in the meantime?
Have you heard anyone genuinely espouse this view? Is this what you think socialized healthcare means too? Everyone gets the exact same medical procedure at the same time too?
Just be clear, that’s not even what “communism” is. This feels like a misinformed understanding of “sharing” based on American propaganda. That’s just American propaganda derived from Soviet era rationing. Read the story this thread is about first.
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
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.
> 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.
I feel like this is very much in flux, and not a constant anywhere. And it's something that is contested over continually. In some places there have been generations of rising quality of life, but not everywhere, all at once.
I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.
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.”
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.
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
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear.
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.
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.
His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken.
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job.
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
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.
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.).
I can do, but I warn you it's long. Be careful what you wish for! YAFIYGI. :-)
I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist...
--
@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: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "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. 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 -- 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.
In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an extreme dichotomy between fundamentalists and new atheists. I personally believe that both worldviews are wrong and inconsistent with lived reality.
No higher power ever wrote anything though. That's all human writing, human promises, human propaganda.
Has any book itself claimed to be written or orated by a higher power?
I'm genuinely curious how you explain your own unconsciousness which comes out all the time when speaking or writing.
What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff.
Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity.
It's blatantly untrue to conclude that when we are largely ignorant of the detailed workings of the brain and of the universe at large, and ultimately unscientific, using Popper's falsifiability principle.
I guess you figured it out. Go pick up your Nobel prize.
Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here?
If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or denied in existence. It is ultimately a matter of faith, or another axiomatic belief, in how you ascribe labels to that which you can't scientifically explain.
So it could be that a "prophetic dream" you experienced one night is truly a sign from a higher power. Or it could be garbled nonsense from electrochemical reactions. You are not allowed to know. If you received authoritative evidence one way, you'd have to verify that the evidence stems from reality, and from there it's a recursive loop.
Yeah, that works. There's someone I know who picked up religion as an adult, and what everyone else sees as his subconscious, he himself thinks is literally the world of god.
Münchhausen trilemma makes it impossible to argue that point either way.
Interesting website. But there's one rationalization missing, imho: that God alters the timeline. That is, amputees are in fact healed in response to prayer, but nobody knows about it because God goes back in time and ensures the amputation never happened in the first place.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire website yet.
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.
> 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)
The steel-man position here — and I say this as one who does not believe in any of the many variations/presentations of the Christian god — is that "answer" does not imply "does what you ask".
What does indicate that the claim "God answers prayers" is false, is the near total lack of personal responses to those praying*, not even so much as "your prayer is important to us, you are number 184,693,224 in the queue" that I'm sure is an SMBC comic but cannot find easily on Google right now — if I had even once had such a clear and obvious statement ringing in my ears when I went through a Catholic school, I wouldn't have switched to Wicca before giving up on religion entirely.
(Not that Wicca gave me direct answers to prayers, just that it never claimed it would, either — Doreen Valiente and Janet & Stewart Farrar were both very clear about having made up the rituals themselves).
* Almost all such people, at least. Just as the number of people who claim to be able to physically shape-shift into werewolves is very small but not zero (guess how to join the dots between me knowing this and having had an interest in Wicca), the number is small enough that… other… causes are more plausible than the divine.
I think you overlook that holy book says “only” God answers prayers. And pray to God for he will answer. The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be the answer you think is correct.
A leg amputated is a leg lost and the journey of a test and struggle that begins next. That’s an answer. Not a lie.
Once again, the writer doesn’t understand God, prayer, religion, and the purpose of man. And he cannot make sense out of this paradigm. So he falls further into misguidance, like a schoolboy who misses the primary instructions only to reject the class entirely.
> 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.
I've studied a fair amount theology, it was my original college major. I am aware of this.
The most salient point he made as far as I'm concerned is that there are very specific claims made throughout the Bible and other Christian literature about what exactly prayer does-- and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false.
I am not opposed to people praying, and in fact wholeheartedly support it in many cases. What I am opposed to is making unreasonable assertions about what is happening when someone prays, and what kinds of results are to be expected.
> there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that many if not most of those particular claims are false
Most, but not all, of these claims are, theologically, untestable.
Here's an analogy: Would you find a guy walking down the street, ask him to take part in your science experiment measuring how high guys can jump, hear him say "no I don't want to take part", then conclude that because he did not jump for you he is unable to jump? You wouldn't. In fact, you might get disciplined by your university's ethics review board for experimentation without consent. In the same way, for most tests, the Bible says that God does not want to be tested. You should assume that your unwilling test subject will not cooperate, or even work to frustrate, your tests.
The talk about observations over longer times can seem persuasive. I think an analog would be hiring a PI to tail the unwilling guy test subject for years. But if you don't see him jump in 5 years, does that mean he can't? What more if he knows you're following him and that you want to see him jump, is years of not jumping valid evidence then? That's not evidence at all, much less overwhelming evidence.
As an agnostic, this is a topic that greatly interests me.
One challenge I've found in navigating this is determining the extent to which (interpretation from an untrained but intelligent layperson) == (interpretation from someone with a lot more historical, linguistic, and theological training).
I.e., how much research is needed before one can reasonably conclude that the "promise" being evaluated isn't just a straw man.
You could reach out to someone with knowledge in that area and ask to talk. Like a theology professor, nerdy pastor, or even a local Jesuit.
Yup, that's my m.o.
Let's hear it for 3-hour breakfast convos at a local greasy spoon :)
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
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.
> 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.
The dystopian part was only enabled (within the story) by the fact that humans were utterly unnecessary to the rich.
None had any jobs, because the AI could do all for less… so why would the oligarchs waste money employing human wage slaves when the machines would always be cheaper than slaves?
Writer's conceipt - a good story needs suffering. The oligarchs might need some human assistance with, for example, software engineering to operate parts of their vast holdings. Note that in the original Manna there were still some human workers - lawyers, at least. Even if it was just 1% of the population, that's a significant number. Note also that the POV character was generally unaware of the wider state of the dystopia, and so were we, the reader.
The workers supply not only the drama of suffering but also a (meagre, absurd) customer base for the fast food restaurants themselves.
Last but not least, given the long distances involved in interstellar travel, an oligarch must delegate their authority, either to a machine, a human, or a combination, and that is an opportunity for some drama as experience and vision inevitably diverge. This would be true even if, for example, the delegate is a perfect clone of the oligarch. It would be within these cracks and crevices hope could form, only to be crushed, in artistic, brutal fashion.
You've described the Terran Accord from "Human Domestication Guide".
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.
> 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.
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.
That is not the shape of the world in the story under discussion.
Within the story, the dystopia crams the masses into cheap housing, they have no jobs nor possibility of jobs, no freedom even to leave as they are apprehended by robots if they try; and the utopia has no need for jobs, but gives out UBI credits to be spent on whatever you want the machines to make for you, and lets you live out a fantasy life.
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.
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.
Inability to save, class immobility, and insecurity of both food and housing are identical problems regardless of whether smartphones have been invented. It's telling who, specifically, advances claims about the notional fabulous wealth of the impoverished in the US.
In any case the assertion that poor communities are in any way better off than their predecessors is only accurate if you push you compare cohorts ~80 years or more apart. After the advent of social safety net programs in the US the working poor were (at least for a time) significantly more able to eventually join the middle class. Modern limitations on earnings and savings that have been applied to these programs has provably reduced this kind of class mobility.
Additionally, the combination of hyperconcentration of wealth, deregulation, and globalized trade have all played a part in the near total elimination of economic opportunity in rural communities.
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.
Almost everything* is accidentally Turing complete — I know the guy who proved that Magic the Gathering is Turing complete, even helped play-test and then bought a copy of his board game.
So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.
But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.
* I jest, but not by much
Which utopia? I saw two dystopias. One the likely future of western society, another being one where your very thoughts are programmed
Do you think that this is not already the case? If not, what was the point of 15+ years of government education?
There's a rather large gap between "mandatory education can be propaganda" and "there is literally a chip connected to your brain".
Red herring, I think. There are many goals for education outcomes, some noble and some base.
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
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.
Which is why there wasn't really a set of hairless apes that were in charge. They had a fully direct democracy.
Who selects the questions people vote? What happens when they get something like this in the screen in the middle of a football match:
> We have preliminary evidence that XYZ is a terrorist and we are sending him to a nice special house with a swimming pool to protect everyone until the investigation finishes. [OK] [Ask me later]
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.
> 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.
Why is innovation and sharing mutually exclusive?
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.
What? How does that make sense?
Is that genuinely what you think sharing means? Everyone everywhere has everything? Obviously that’s not the case. And even if it was, why can’t independent inventors create thing in the meantime?
Have you heard anyone genuinely espouse this view? Is this what you think socialized healthcare means too? Everyone gets the exact same medical procedure at the same time too?
Just be clear, that’s not even what “communism” is. This feels like a misinformed understanding of “sharing” based on American propaganda. That’s just American propaganda derived from Soviet era rationing. Read the story this thread is about first.
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
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.
> 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.
I feel like this is very much in flux, and not a constant anywhere. And it's something that is contested over continually. In some places there have been generations of rising quality of life, but not everywhere, all at once.
Well for starters having the technology for prefect recycling.
I interpreted it had perfect enough for their goals rather than breaking any thermodynamic laws or something.
Accelerando
I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.
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.”
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.
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
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear.
[1] Which is still incredibly up: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm
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.
Loved that website. Its intro to C programming was how I got into programming.
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.
Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful for the time we got to spend together.
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...
His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken.
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
That is a very weird and troubling article.
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.
Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
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.
This makes me nostalgic for the small internet.
He was also the author of https://marshallbrain.com/manna, a sci-fi story that has stuck with me for years.
Very relevant in the age of smart glasses for workers.
I was think about the software some companies use to “monitor productivity”
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.
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.
Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job.
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
Wow, thanks for sharing this story! As a long time friend of Marshall’s it’s fascinating to hear folks share their encounters with his work.
What are you up to now?
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.
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.
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.).
I can do, but I warn you it's long. Be careful what you wish for! YAFIYGI. :-)
I didn't use a direct timecode link because 1.) it's not really all in one place, and 2.) I feel the entire interview is almost a microcosm of his thought. But if you insist...
--
@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: (on privacy in a Manna-like world) "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. 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 -- 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.
In his honor, we should all strive to hold something of Marshall Brain's optimism in ourselves. Thanks for reading.
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.
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...
Duplicate (different submitted link, however): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42222387
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I wondered. How dark.
He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).
What a loss.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...
[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not
I loved his articles and stories. Hopefully his sites are archived before being taken down.
TIL about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo from reading about Marshall.
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.
What happens with domains, content, etc now? Is there a systematic way of preparing and securing online services for death?
archive.org|.ph
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.
"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)
Hey that's how I learned C
RIP
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.
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?
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.
What guard rails could anyone with an unrestrained high IQ possibly have?
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.
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.
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
I found the linked, and subsequently linked, posts very insightful, and entirely relatable, thank you.