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.
Yes, I'm not trying to demonstrate that something is true but I'm trying to illustrate what Korzybyski's ideas are about.
The issue is more that the word is appears. Right/Wrong is black-and-white dichotomous thinking. Maps are not right or wrong but have degrees of accuracy in mapping certain teritory and usefulness for navigating the territory.
You will find somewhere a claim that humans have rougly 12 billion neurons. That happens to be clearly wrong and humans have more neurons but it doesn't matter much to the main thesis and it's not what makes reading the book hard.
Most sentence of the book are not clearly right or wrong. Mostly what's driven the kind of criticism that Martin Gardner gives is not that Korzybyski says thinks that are easily shown to be wrong but that Korzybyski says things, where it's not clear what point Korzybyski tries to make.
It's a bit like reading a Zen Koan. You don't ask yourself: "Is this claim wrong?" but "What is the author trying to tell me?"
I refer to the quote "The simple reason is that Korzybyski made no contributions of significance to any of the fields about which he wrote with such seeming erudition".
Yes, I already addressed this.
This sort of writing is only worth the effort of engaging with if there's enough useful or interesting content there to warrant it. So we come back to my question: is there more there than if think from e.g. what Gardner wrote? This still isn't clear to me.
... which doesn't say anything about whether he influenced anybody. At least, not when interpreted the way I meant it. Do you define "making a contribution of significance" to mean"influencing people"?