i would not stereotype him with likes of Rand or Hubbard (yikes!)
Yeah, there's the difference between deciding that his stuff is actually the same kind of stuff as some very iffy stuff, and then skipping it, and just noting a vague and very possibly unfair surface resemblance to iffy stuff, and then not bothering to investigate further since the stuff is 70 years old and there should be more people saying it's important if it really is.
I lent him my copy of RAW's Quantum Psychology held it up to the whole class the next day and lectured on why you shouldn't read books like that.
What should I know about this one? I know that when a book has "quantum" in the title and is not a physics book, the odds are that it really is a book you shouldn't be reading. If my quick-and-unfair pattern match for Korzybski was Hubbard+Rand, my quick-and-unfair pattern match for something titled "Quantum Psychology" is The Secret.
Then again, I do know that RAW should be more interesting than that, though I also have the suspicion that his stuff may be a bit too stuck in the counterculture of the 60s and 70s to really have aged well.
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).