I know about Korzybski and his general semantics, but very little about the actual substance of the stuff. Beyond E-Prime, which seems cutesy but too flimsy for any serious lifting. My brain keeps wanting to slot him up in that weird corner of mid-20th century American ideaspace that spawned Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. He has the pulp science fiction connection, the cranky outsider contrarian fans who think the system as the end-all of philosophy, and yet his stuff seems mostly ignored by contemporary academia. None of this is an actual indictment, but with no evidence to the contrary, it does keep me from being very interested.
the cranky outsider contrarian fans who think the system as the end-all of philosophy, and yet his stuff seems mostly ignored by contemporary academia.
i haven't heard that end-all of philosophy bit (could come from his strong following of Wittgenstein) , but I do know he is considered to be a principle predecessor of self-help psychology, which might explain the anti-academic bias...i would not stereotype him with likes of Rand or Hubbard (yikes!)
The only academic I can recall talking to him about was my Learning and History & Systems of Psych. pro...
To break up the awkward silence at the start of a recent Overcoming Bias meetup, I asked everyone present to tell their rationalist origin story - a key event or fact that played a role in their first beginning to aspire to rationality. This worked surprisingly well (and I would recommend it for future meetups).
I think I've already told enough of my own origin story on Overcoming Bias: how I was digging in my parents' yard as a kid and found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem, and how I wore it to bed that night and dreamed of a woman in white, holding an ancient leather-bound book called Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (eds. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, 1982)... but there's no need to go into that again.
So, seriously... how did you originally go down that road?
Added: For some odd reason, many of the commenters here seem to have had a single experience in common - namely, at some point, encountering Overcoming Bias... But I'm especially interested in what it takes to get the transition started - crossing the first divide. This would be very valuable knowledge if it can be generalized. If that did happen at OB, please try to specify what was the crucial "Aha!" insight (down to the specific post if possible).