Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness (1932)

It wouldn't be a surprise if Russell were the classic intellectual type with strong affections for humanity in the abstract and the people around him not so much. Champions of causes are often this way. There are incredibly striking and tragic cases of this, such as what happened between Gandhi and his oldest son. But one should especially hesitate to condemn in matters of the heart.

I'm afraid I don't remember the sources I read (other than Poundstone's book) and don't have time to dig into it just now, though given what I posted I suppose I should. FWIW, my memory is that he was asked about it more than once in the 1960s, denied that he'd said what he'd said, and then responded evasively when presented with evidence of it. On the other hand, my memory is that he'd advocated for a nuclear strike in print; and given the debate you linked to, that seems unlikely.

Edit: My conscience wouldn't sit still until I did dig around a bit. The question is more controversial than Poundstone's book made it seem, so I definitely shouldn't have said "definitely". When will I learn :) On the other hand, there's a lot more material than that Economist article made it seem (the editor of Russell's letters who was defending Russell in that piece really comes across as disingenuous for not mentioning this), and some of it is pretty unpleasant.

The consensus seems to be that Russell advocated threatening the USSR with nuclear strikes to force them to change their policies. Whether he advocated pre-emptive war itself is controversial. He made many comments about this in the 40s and 50s. From a BBC interview in 1959:

BBC: "Is it true or untrue that in recent years you advocated that a preventive war might be made against communism, against Soviet Russia?”

Russell: “It’s entirely true, and I don’t repent of it.”

Other comments were ambiguous (he thought it necessary to "bully the Russians" with the threat of bombing them but hoped it would not lead to war, etc.) Later, he claimed that he had simply "entirely forgotten" that he had ever advocated this. At least two serious biographers, Ronald Clark and Ray Monk, do not find this credible. Here's Clark:

[Russell's] explanation that he had simply forgotten what he had said [...] would be more acceptable if applied to one speech rather than to a long series of articles and statements [...] It might be possible to argue that his disavowal of advocating preventive war was based on the most academic interpretation of the term: that advocating the threat of war unless a potential enemy submitted, even though being prepared to have your bluff called, was not advocacy of a preventive war. But even this questionable escape-route is blocked by Russell’s own statement to [the BBC] and [by] his earlier suggestion that “a casus belli would not be difficult to find".

This paper (a long and convoluted defense of Russell) shows up in Google and contains the salient quotes: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

My conclusion is that what I wrote wasn't far off, but it was unfair to lump Russell in with von Neumann, Lemay, and the rest of the Dr. Strangelove set who were advocating for nuclear war outright.

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When I look at the end results of work, I come to the same conclusion that indeed it ultimately consists of reconfiguring matter. That's what we need to do to reach whatever goals we have. Maybe the conceptspace work maps to the levels of intricacy of the end-result matter configuration, i.e. the more complex, precise thing you want to get, the more energy you need to expend on thinking rather than arranging atoms. It's easier to move a ton of bricks from one place to another than to design a microprocessor.

So I guess that ultimately I agree with your comment.

(disclaimer: writing this after two beers)

The output of a programmer is the output of their mind, not of their muscles. I've stacked boxes in a warehouse and that sort of work is altogether different from telling transistors when to output a high voltage instead of a low voltage, which is fundamentally what we are doing when we are programming.

This is simply not true. Hunter-gatherer societies are typically egalitarian, and our species has subsisted by hunting and gathering for the vast majority of its existence.

My crystal ball is probably murkier than yours but I would disagree with the assertion that that humans will never achieve equality as you define it. All our current systems of economics and power are predicated on the belief that "resources" are limited and must therefore be allocated (owned, shared, distributed, exchanged) on the basis of scarcity. In such a system, the question of distribution becomes critical; the models been some combinations of "according to effort" or "according to need". However in a "post-scarcity" environment (free or cheap energy, for example) in which the belief is no longer true, other models of distribution become possible. It's far fetched, but I wouldn't bet against it. Just think of the various social, political, economic and technological changes over the past few hundred years.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"