[Link] Eric S. Raymond - Me and Less Wrong

philh

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6549

I’ve gotten questions from a couple of different quarters recently about my relationship to the the rationalist community around Less Wrong and related blogs. The one sentence answer is that I consider myself a fellow-traveler and ally of that culture, but not really part of it nor particularly wishing to be.

The rest of this post is a slightly longer development of that answer.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6549

I’ve gotten questions from a couple of different quarters recently about my relationship to the the rationalist community around Less Wrong and related blogs. The one sentence answer is that I consider myself a fellow-traveler and ally of that culture, but not really part of it nor particularly wishing to be.

The rest of this post is a slightly longer development of that answer.

Eric writes:

One major difference is that I learned techniques corresponding to much of the the Less Wrong analytical method from Alfred Korzybski’s discipline of General Semantics, a very long time ago.

Me too. One disappointment I had after coming here was finding that while Less Wrong might note that The Map Is Not the Territory, there was very little influence here from Korzybski himself, or even from the rest of General Semantics more generally. Which is too bad. It's good stuff, served up in conceptual chunks much like the sequences, and when I talk to people who have had real influence from GS, the level of conceptual sanity is always a cut above. The only example of someone with real knowledge of Korzybski I know of from LW is Richard Kennaway, who proves the rule again. I think even Dan Dennett had some oblique interest.

I remember Eric showing up on a small Stirnerite Egoist mailing list I was very involved in, peddling anarchism if I remember right. I don't think he stayed long. I seem to remember him being elsewhere too. Certainly Libernet. Paul Vixie's list? Maybe Extropians? He did get around. Very funny to have him pop up here too. It's a small world after all.

Eliezer was influenced a lot by Korzybyski via Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action.

10gjm11y

So, long ago I was rather put off Korzybyski and General Semantics by the brief discussion of them in Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science". A few sample quotations: [...] The impression I get from Gardner is that "the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good". So, e.g., Korzybyski is of course right to say that black-and-white dichotomous thinking is harmful, and that it's useful to distinguish between a thing and a description of that thing, and that "is" can be a treacherous word. But we didn't need Korzybyski to tell us that. And much of what's distinctive in Korzybyski (again, I'm describing the impression I get from people like Gardner) is just plain wrong. Is that all wrong? Is there substantially more to Korzybyski and "General Semantics"? Has present-day GS filtered out all the pseudoscience while preserving (or, better, newly finding) a lot of insight? Are there insights there that are unique to GS?

21Vaniver11y

If I were to read a single Korzybski book, which one should I read? Would the answer be different if I wanted to read many, but wanted to know which one to start with?

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[Link] Eric S. Raymond - Me and Less Wrong

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[Link] Eric S. Raymond - Me and Less Wrong

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