To explain: Alfred Koryzbski, the guy behind General Semantics, is basically “rationality from 100 years ago”. (He lived 1879-1950.) He’s ~2 generations before Feynman (1918-1988), who was ~one before Sagan (1934-1996), then there’s a 2-3 generation gap to Yudkowsky (1979-). (Of course if you add more names to the list, the gaps disappear; reordering your list, you get James Randi (1928-2020), Dawkins (1941-), Hitchens (1949-2011), Michael Shermer (1954-), and Sam Harris (1967-) which takes you from Feynman to Yudkowsky, basically.)
He features in Rationalism before the Sequences, and is interesting both because 1) you can directly read his stuff, like Science and Sanity, and 2) most of his stuff has already made it to you indirectly, from the student’s students. (Yudkowsky apparently wrote the Sequences before reading any Korzybski directly, but read lots of stuff written by people who read Korzybski.)
There are, of course, figures before Korzybski, but I think the gaps get larger / it becomes less obviously “rationalism” instead of something closer to “science”.
Yeah, if we went for a full history of rationality we definitely would have mentioned him. We haven’t because I don’t think he had much of an influence over the “Skeptics” brand of rationality, which we talked about as the popular form of rationality before Eliezer. I think one of the things that distinguished Eliezer’s form of rationality was that he integrated Korzybski’s ideas into it.
To explain: Alfred Koryzbski, the guy behind General Semantics, is basically “rationality from 100 years ago”. (He lived 1879-1950.) He’s ~2 generations before Feynman (1918-1988), who was ~one before Sagan (1934-1996), then there’s a 2-3 generation gap to Yudkowsky (1979-). (Of course if you add more names to the list, the gaps disappear; reordering your list, you get James Randi (1928-2020), Dawkins (1941-), Hitchens (1949-2011), Michael Shermer (1954-), and Sam Harris (1967-) which takes you from Feynman to Yudkowsky, basically.)
He features in Rationalism before the Sequences, and is interesting both because 1) you can directly read his stuff, like Science and Sanity, and 2) most of his stuff has already made it to you indirectly, from the student’s students. (Yudkowsky apparently wrote the Sequences before reading any Korzybski directly, but read lots of stuff written by people who read Korzybski.)
There are, of course, figures before Korzybski, but I think the gaps get larger / it becomes less obviously “rationalism” instead of something closer to “science”.
Ah, of course!
Yeah, if we went for a full history of rationality we definitely would have mentioned him. We haven’t because I don’t think he had much of an influence over the “Skeptics” brand of rationality, which we talked about as the popular form of rationality before Eliezer. I think one of the things that distinguished Eliezer’s form of rationality was that he integrated Korzybski’s ideas into it.