There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.
dfltr 31 minutes ago [-]
It's amazing how much fuck-you-and-fuck-who-you-fuck-with Russell managed to fit into a few ink smudges on a piece of paper.
ghurtado 24 minutes ago [-]
You can almost feel the hammer violently hitting the paper and nearly poking a hole in it with some of these words.
Simultaneously polite, peaceful, respectful, diplomatic, and succinct in writing. LLMs have a long way to go.
SideburnsOfDoom 1 hours ago [-]
IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
moritzwarhier 31 minutes ago [-]
Why did you write so many words then?
Your second paragraph says nothing.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
mikestorrent 30 minutes ago [-]
English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.
moritzwarhier 26 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
ghurtado 20 minutes ago [-]
The point is that a large percentage of the words in any sentence are there to provide structure, not meaning.
Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.
mikestorrent 31 minutes ago [-]
That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.
ghurtado 22 minutes ago [-]
You confuse "succinct" with "laconic".
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
mjd 2 hours ago [-]
I always feel funny starting letters with
“dear”, but next time that happens I'm going to remember that this one started with “Dear Sir Oswald,”.
mikestorrent 29 minutes ago [-]
Well, when you're saying "goodbye", remember you're really saying "God be with ye"....
esafak 51 minutes ago [-]
I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you could even say "Dear Sirs" -- but in the US at least it seems "dear" has come to reserved only for close recipients.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
A tangent..
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
esoterae 29 minutes ago [-]
Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
IndySun 15 minutes ago [-]
A propos
giraffe_lady 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks mods for the title fix.
I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
> more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
I understand that Professor Yaffle -- the woodpecker bookend in the classic kids' TV show Bagpuss -- was loosely based on Russell.
interestica 47 minutes ago [-]
They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.
He's less well known because the British generally don't elect their charismatic fascists leader of the country. Instead he was jailed and his organization banned.
lostlogin 2 hours ago [-]
> the British generally don't elect their charismatic fascists leader
Hold that thought. Current UK politics have taken a turn and the combination of major party incompetence and rising anger might change that.
mikestorrent 28 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, is there anyone at all in British politics that an international observer would consider charismatic? Can't remember one in my lifetime.
graemep 49 minutes ago [-]
I think not.
The protests last Saturday got a boost from the murder of Charlie Kirk so the large turnout is misleading.
The only British political figure willing to accept Elon Musk's backing is Tommy Robinson, and he is not a major player, just someone good at getting into newspapers. Very different from the US or continental Europe - for example Germany where AfD (which took Musk's money) has seats in both the national and European parliaments.
JetSetWilly 1 hours ago [-]
Fortunately in Britain we have moved far from the values of former labour MP and noted Europhile Sir Oswald Mosley. I would see reform as a fairly traditional conservative party, though I appreciate that there are many that are keen to shift the overton window so far that they can be described as somehow “far right”.
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
I do not think many people are aware of his post-war politics:
There are quite a few things there (e.g. that he wanted laws against marrying someone of another race, that he saw himself as left wing, etc.) that I did not know, although id did know of his involvement in the Union Movement.
He was also a Conservative MP (later joining Labour)
nabla9 1 hours ago [-]
Brits don't elect their PM in their first place. That might be the reason. The structure of British democracy kept fascists away, as well as anything new, not the British people.
Sir Oswald Mosley was member of parliament before starting the BUF. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons when he started as Conservative. He eventually switched to Labour.
harpiaharpyja 47 minutes ago [-]
> The structure of British democracy kept fascists away, not British people.
That sentence was particularly hard to parse. It read like you were saying that the structure of British democracy kept fascists away, but did not keep the British people away (???).
I did manage to figure it out eventually though. I think you meant to write:
It was the structure of British democracy that kept fascists away, not the British people.
nabla9 36 minutes ago [-]
Grammar Nazis are always attacking us Grammar Jews.
graemep 1 hours ago [-]
> Instead he was jailed and his organization banned.
He was interned during world war II as a security measure. He was released before the end of the war and never charged with anything.
bshimmin 41 minutes ago [-]
Not to worry, though: his grandson, Louis, is in charge of Palantir in the UK. Definitely nothing concerning about that!
overrun11 34 minutes ago [-]
Why would that be at all concerning? His grandson is guilty by blood?
anjel 22 minutes ago [-]
Ask Marine Le Pen about her blood type as it might motivate her.
2 hours ago [-]
2 hours ago [-]
lovelearning 1 hours ago [-]
> It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own.
Perfectly describes how I feel when talking with rightwingers.
exoverito 28 minutes ago [-]
By your omission I can assume you don't feel that way about leftists? I certainly find tankies and figures like Sartre repellent on multiple levels. He was an apologist for Stalinist communism, downplayed the show trials and gulags, and infamously denounced Camus for his 'naive' rejection of revolutionary violence.
mikestorrent 23 minutes ago [-]
Much as I like the elocution of Russell's letter, it's clear that it boils down to an unwillingness to continue the conversation, which is inherently somewhat an indication of weakness, even if it doesn't imply defeat. When one is resoundingly winning an argument, it's much rarer to take this position, after all.
It's entirely possible to logically respond to fascists (if you actually find one that isn't just a role-playing fool) and to push back against their extremism. The first step of that is actually understanding what it is that they really purport to believe, rather than attacking the easy strawmen that have been rhetorically established for you.
Anyone who wants to attack fascism should read Evola's critique on fascism "from the right" - really helped me fill in my understanding on what these people were trying to do, to separate the ideology-in-theory from the ideology-in-practice. Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
When arguing with someone, it's usually best to actually get a mental model of how they themselves think... but that's a vulnerable moment for both parties involved, and not always something that can happen in the heat of verbal sparring.
Some stuff is online. Here’s a curated collection of some really interesting letters sent to him:
https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letters
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
Your second paragraph says nothing.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_regularity
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
• A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA
While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.
Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/bracers-basic-search?search_api_...
https://peaky-blinders.fandom.com/wiki/Oswald_Mosley
Hold that thought. Current UK politics have taken a turn and the combination of major party incompetence and rising anger might change that.
The protests last Saturday got a boost from the murder of Charlie Kirk so the large turnout is misleading.
The only British political figure willing to accept Elon Musk's backing is Tommy Robinson, and he is not a major player, just someone good at getting into newspapers. Very different from the US or continental Europe - for example Germany where AfD (which took Musk's money) has seats in both the national and European parliaments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley#Post-war_politic...
There are quite a few things there (e.g. that he wanted laws against marrying someone of another race, that he saw himself as left wing, etc.) that I did not know, although id did know of his involvement in the Union Movement.
He was also a Conservative MP (later joining Labour)
Sir Oswald Mosley was member of parliament before starting the BUF. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons when he started as Conservative. He eventually switched to Labour.
That sentence was particularly hard to parse. It read like you were saying that the structure of British democracy kept fascists away, but did not keep the British people away (???).
I did manage to figure it out eventually though. I think you meant to write:
It was the structure of British democracy that kept fascists away, not the British people.
He was interned during world war II as a security measure. He was released before the end of the war and never charged with anything.
Perfectly describes how I feel when talking with rightwingers.
It's entirely possible to logically respond to fascists (if you actually find one that isn't just a role-playing fool) and to push back against their extremism. The first step of that is actually understanding what it is that they really purport to believe, rather than attacking the easy strawmen that have been rhetorically established for you.
Anyone who wants to attack fascism should read Evola's critique on fascism "from the right" - really helped me fill in my understanding on what these people were trying to do, to separate the ideology-in-theory from the ideology-in-practice. Just like with communism, where "true communism has never been tried", so too nobody's ever really tried "true" fascism, or democracy for that matter.
When arguing with someone, it's usually best to actually get a mental model of how they themselves think... but that's a vulnerable moment for both parties involved, and not always something that can happen in the heat of verbal sparring.