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Viliam comments on Time-Binding - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (18)
Korzybski fits into a larger intellectual pattern since the Enlightenment, where smart people think that human affairs have gotten disordered somehow.The intellectual reformer believes he can diagnose the problem, find a solution by arguing from plausible first principles, and then get humanity back on a normative path. Just think of Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, etc.
Basically these intellectuals think teleologically, and they assume that humans should have instruction manuals that intellectuals can deduce and make explicit so that humans can fulfill their proper "purpose," whatever that means. Considering that all of the attempts at writing these implicit manuals disagree on fundamental matters, perhaps we should just reject the assumption and acknowledge that we evolved as kludges with conflicting and ill-fitting components, which don't allow for the inferencing of a coherent instruction manual.
My feeling is that these people are right about some things where the society is wrong, but also wrong plus horribly overconfident about other things.
Maybe it is a curse of being significantly more intelligent than most people around you. Nine times of ten, people around do something obviously stupid. Once, it is you who is stupid about things that most people get approximately right, but you cannot distinguish it from the former case -- also you are already stuck in the belief that the other people are always wrong (especially if they don't have enough verbal skills or academic credentials).
Also, underestimating domain-specific knowledge, and thinking that general intelligence can solve everything even without the relevant data. Not necessarily arguing literally from the "first principles", but rather having very little and very unrepresentative data (an equivalent of seeing a few youtube videos on the topic today), and believing that this is enough as long as you use a lot of brainpower to extrapolate from these data.