before LW was OB. before OB was SL4, before that was…
There used to be solitary transhumanist visionaries/nutcases, like Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson (very different in their amount of “rationality”), and there used to be, say, fans of Hofstadter or Jaynes, but the merging of “rationalism” and… orientation towards the future was certainly invented in the 1990s. Ah, what a blissful decade that was.
There used to be solitary transhumanist visionaries/nutcases, like Timothy Leary or Robert Anton Wilson (very different in their amount of “rationality”), and there used to be, say, fans of Hofstadter or Jaynes, but the merging of “rationalism” and… orientation towards the future was certainly invented in the 1990s. Ah, what a blissful decade that was.
Russian communism was a type of rationalist futurism: down with religion, plan the economy…
Hmm, yeah. I was thinking about the U.S. specifically, here.