Reading the preface to Science and Sanity by Korzybski:
From its very inception, the discipline of general semantics has been such as to attract persons possessing high intellectual integrity, independence from orthodox commitments, and agnostic, disinterested and critical inclinations. (...) For them, authority reposes not in any omniscient or omnipresent messiah, but solely in the dependability of the predictive content of propositions made with reference to the non-verbal happenings in this universe. They apply this basic rubric as readily to korzybskian doctrine as to all other abstract formulations and theories and, like good scientists, they are prepared to cast them off precisely as soon as eventualities reveal them to be incompetent, i.e., lacking in reliable predictive content. This circumstance in itself should abrogate once and for all the feckless charges sometimes made by ill-informed critics that general semantics is but one more of a long succession of cults, having its divine master, its disciples, a bible, its own mumbo-jumbo and ceremonial rites. (...) Far from being inclined to repel changes that appear to menace the make-up of general semantics, they actively anticipate them and are prepared to foster those that seem to promise better predictions, better survival and better adaptation to the vicissitudes of this earthly habitat.
One cannot help but be aware, in 1958, that there is far less suspicion and misgiving among intellectuals concerning general semantics and general semanticists than prevailed ten and twenty years ago. Indeed, a certain receptivity is noticeable. The term ‘semantics’ itself is now frequently heard on the radio, TV and the public speaking platform and it appears almost as frequently in the public print. It has even found a recent ‘spot’ in a Hollywood movie and it gives some promise of becoming an integral part of our household jargon. This in no sense means that all such users of the term have familiarized themselves with the restricted meaning of the term ‘semantics,’ much less that they have internalized the evaluative implications and guiding principles of action subsumed under general semantics. A comparable circumstance obtains, of course, in the layman’s use of other terms, such as ‘electronics.’
(...) The years since the close of World War II have similarly witnessed the access of general semantics not only to academic curricula of the primary, secondary and collegiate levels of the North and South American continents, parts of Western Europe, Britain, Australia and Japan, but to the busy realms of commerce, industry and transportation: of military organization and civil administration; of law, engineering, sociology, economics and religion. These constitute no negligible extensions of general semantics into the world of ‘practical’ affairs. Large business enterprises, looking toward the improvement of intra-and extramural relations, more satisfying resolutions of the complicated problems that arise between labor and management, and the enhancement of service to their immediate constituents and fellow men in general have found it rewarding, in many instances, to reorganize their entire structure so as to assure the incorporation of general semantic formulations. Several organizations now in existence make it their sale business to advise and provide help in the implementation of such changes. The core of their prescriptions consists in the appropriate application of general semantics. It is becoming a routine for the high and intermediate level executives of certain industries, advertising agencies, banking establishments and the like to retreat for several days at a time while they receive intensive instruction and participate in seminar-workshops designed to indoctrinate them with the principles of general semantics. Comparable courses of instruction have been provided within recent years for the officers of the U.S. Air Academy, the traffic officers of the Chicago Police Department and the sales forces of several large pharmaceutical and biochemical houses. These innovations in business procedure entail, of course, enormous outlays of time, energy and money. They must in time pay perceptible dividends or suffer abandonment. That they are steadily on the increase appears to offer eloquent testimony of their effectiveness.
(...) Membership in the two major organizations concerned with the development, teaching and utilization of general
semantics, namely, the Institute of General Semantics located at Lakeville, Connecticut and the International Society for General Semantics, with its central office at Chicago, has slowly but steadily increased over the years and, gratifyingly, has generally avoided the ‘lunatic fringe’ that appears ever ready to attach itself to convenient nuclei. (...) numerous sectional conferences have been held in various cities each year and the number of courses sought and offered in general semantics is definitely on the increase.
All in all, then, a healthy state of affairs appears to prevail in respect of general semantics. The impact of Korzybski’s work on Western culture is now unmistakable and there is every reason to be optimistic that his precepts will be read by ever-widening circles of serious students and that the latter, in their turn, must deeply influence generations of students yet to come. It remains to be seen what effects the regular implementation of these precepts will bring to mankind. Many of us are convinced that they will prove highly salutary.
Impressive! It’s like reading about CFAR from a parallel universe. I wonder what happened in that parallel universe fifty years after this text was published. Can we use it as an outside view for the LW rationality movement fifty years after they achieve the successes listed here?
In the 20st century serious intellectual thought mostly became thought backed up by academia. Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments. Many departments were also pressured into doing research that’s directly useful to corporations and that can produce patents.
General Semantics and also Cybernetics are fields that lost as a result.
I think there a good case that times change. With the Giving Pledge there a lot of Billionaire money that wants to fund new structures. OpenAI is one example of a well funded projected that likely wouldn’t have existed in that form in the past. Sam Altman also wants to fund other similar research projects.
The OpenPhilantrophy project is sitting on a lot of money that it wants to funnel into effective project without caring at all about departmental overlapping.
A world where a lot of people live in their own filter bubble instead of living in the bubble created by mainstream media might also lack what we call mainstream at the moment.
Yesterday I was at a Circling meetup in Berlin. I also read at the same day about the experience of an old Facebook friend that lives in the US that did a circling trainers training. In my filter bouble Circling is a global trend at the moment but that doesn’t mean that it’s mainstream.
If we look at general semantics it’s also worth noting that it both succeeded and failed. The phrase “The map is not the territory” is very influential. Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is named that way because of Korzybski usage of the term neuro-linguistic. NLP is based on general semantics but it evolved a lot from that point. NLP is today an influential intellectual framework outside of the academic mainstream.
Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments.
I could imagine some good reasons for doing so. Sometimes scientists who are experts in one field become crackpots in another field, and it may be dificult for the new colleagues to argue against them if the crackpot can euler them by using the arguments from their old field.
On the other hand, there is the saying that a map is not the territory, and this seems like suggesting that the existing maps can be modified in the middle, but the boundaries are fixed. But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
My argument is primarily about whether that historical development was good or bad. It was that there are reasons why certain memes won over others that aren’t directly about the merit of the memes. Additionally I make the prognosis that those reasons are less likely to hold in the next 40 years the way they did in the last 40.
But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics
Today computer science is very much a subfield of math. Heinz von Foerster had a psychatrist in his Biological Computer Laboratory. He wanted to study computing, system theory, cybernetics or whatever word you want to use broadly.
The Biological Computer Laboratory was shut down when the military came to the point of deciding that funding it doesn’t produce militarily useful results.
But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
As far as I know we don’t have professors for game theory as a discipline. We have economic professors who study game theory, mathematics professors who study it and psychology professors who study it.
We don’t have departments of game theory.
Never heard of Circling until your post. Looked it up, initially find nothing going on in San Diego (California US). I wonder if it is more of a European thing?
If you know how I can find something local to San Diego CA US, please let me know.
Ease of applicability. If the average middle manager cannot apply a technique easily or straightforwardly while working, the major pressure to use a technique will be social signalling (cf. corporate buzzword speak).
Measurable outcomes. If the average middle manager cannot easily observe that the technique makes her job easier (either the productivity of subordinates or her control over them), then she will have no reason to emotionally or intellectually invest in the technique.
I do think rationality is a niche. I had a conversation with a not-particularly-bright administrative assistant at work where she expressed the teachings of Jehovah’s Witness as straightforward truth. She talked some of the chaos of her life (drugs, depression) before joining them. As I expressed the abstract case for, essentially, being careful about what one believes, it seemed clear enough to me that she had little or nothing to gain by being “right” (or rather adopting my opinion which is more likely to be true in a Bayesian sense) and she seemed to fairly clearly have something to lose. I, on the other hand, have a philosopho-physicist’s values and also value finding regular (non-theological) truths by carefully rejecting my biases, so I was making a choice that (probably) makes sense for me.
When my 14 year old daughter (now 16 and doing much better) was “experimenting” with alcohol, marijuana, and shop-lifting, I had a “come to Jesus” talk with my religious cousin. She told me that I knew right from wrong and that I was doing my daughter no favors by teaching her skepticism above morality. I decided she was essentially correct, and that some of my own “skepticism” was actually self-serving, letting me off the hook for some stealing I had done from employers starting when I was about 15.
I view rationality as a thing we can do with our neocortex. But clearly we have a functional emotional brain that “knows” there are monsters or tigers when we are afraid of the dark and “knows” that girls we are attracted to are also attracted to us. I continue to question whether I am doing myself or my children any real favors by being as devoted to this particular feature of my neocortex as I am.
I think cybernetics the practice / math is alive and well, even if cybernetics the name is mostly discarded. Take a look at Wiener’s wiki page:
Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society.
The right way to read that is that it’s used in seven fields, not zero.
Cybernetics is alive but I think it’s misleading to call it well.
When talking about an issue like weight loss the dominating paradigm is “calories in, calories out” and not a cybernetics inspired paradigm.
We don’t live in a world where any scale on the market allows automatic calculating of the moving averages of the hacker diet.
Quantified Self as movement is based on Cybernetics. At first European conference Gary spoke about how cybernetics is not well.
I had an old professor in university who taught physiology based on regulation system thinking (cybernetics but he didn’t use the word cybernetics). According to him there’s was no textbook that presents that perspective we could use for the course.
So it seems like cybernetics was dissected and some of its parts were digested by various disciplines, but the original spirit which connected those parts together was lost.
An analogy for the rationality movement would be if in a few decades some of the CFAR or MIRI lessons will become accepted material in pedagogics, physics, or maybe even AI research, but the whole spirit of “tsuyoku naritai” will be forgotten.
Some parts that I guess are likely to survive, because they can fit in the existing education:
treating emotions as rational or irrational depending on whether they relate to facts (psychology)
planning fallacy (management)
illusion of transparency (pedagogics)
Some parts that I guess are likely to be ignored, because they seem too trivial, and don’t fit to the existing educational system. They may be mentioned as a footnote in philosophy, but they will not be noticed, because philosophy already contains millions of mostly useless ideas:
making beliefs pay rent
noticing confusion
fake explanations
mysterious answers
affective spirals
fallacy of grey
dissolving the question
tsuyoku naritai
rationality as a common cause of many causes
EDIT: Reading my lists again, seems like the main difference is between things you can describe and things you have to do. The focus of academia is to describe stuff, not to train people. Which makes sense, sure. Except for the paradoxical part where you have to train people to become better at correctly describing stuff.
I haven’t read the book, but looking at the reviews on the page you linked...
First, it’s funny what once passed for pop science. (...) at least 10% of the pages are devoted to difficult equations and proofs, and I had to skip a couple of chapters because the math was way, way over my head.
Wiener was both philosopher and scientist. As a scientist he was evidently peerless at the time; as a philosopher he reads as … quirky. But at least he’s trying. (...) his assertion that the body is a machine—a wonderfully complex machine, but a machine nevertheless—apparently had not been so internalized by his intended audience (again, a mathematically literate lay audience) that it was unnecessary to make the point.
(Wiener) was clearly committed to a program of ethical research and development. He warned of the danger of developing dangerous computing applications, and dismissed the idea that we can always “turn off” machines that we don’t like, since it isn’t always clear that the danger exists until after the damage is done.
That’s like Eliezer from a parallel universe, except that in this parallel universe the alternative Eliezer was a professor of mathematics at MIT.
One cannot help but be aware, in 1958, that there is far less suspicion and misgiving among intellectuals concerning general semantics and general semanticists than prevailed ten and twenty years ago. Indeed, a certain receptivity is noticeable. The term ‘semantics’ itself is now frequently heard on the radio, TV and the public speaking platform and it appears almost as frequently in the public print.
Not everything that has ‘semantics’ written on it is ‘general semantics’. The academic seminars on semantics rather see themselves in the tradition of linguistics.
Reading the preface to Science and Sanity by Korzybski:
Impressive! It’s like reading about CFAR from a parallel universe. I wonder what happened in that parallel universe fifty years after this text was published. Can we use it as an outside view for the LW rationality movement fifty years after they achieve the successes listed here?
Yeah, I guess LW rationality should be filed under “intellectual fads” rather than “cults”.
What are the dynamics that produce a fad rather than growth into the mainstream? It might be worth CFAR thinking about that.
In the 20st century serious intellectual thought mostly became thought backed up by academia. Academia then had a custom that it didn’t really like interdisciplinary departments but it tried to organize itself into nonoverlapping departments. Many departments were also pressured into doing research that’s directly useful to corporations and that can produce patents.
General Semantics and also Cybernetics are fields that lost as a result.
I think there a good case that times change. With the Giving Pledge there a lot of Billionaire money that wants to fund new structures. OpenAI is one example of a well funded projected that likely wouldn’t have existed in that form in the past. Sam Altman also wants to fund other similar research projects.
The OpenPhilantrophy project is sitting on a lot of money that it wants to funnel into effective project without caring at all about departmental overlapping.
A world where a lot of people live in their own filter bubble instead of living in the bubble created by mainstream media might also lack what we call mainstream at the moment. Yesterday I was at a Circling meetup in Berlin. I also read at the same day about the experience of an old Facebook friend that lives in the US that did a circling trainers training. In my filter bouble Circling is a global trend at the moment but that doesn’t mean that it’s mainstream.
If we look at general semantics it’s also worth noting that it both succeeded and failed. The phrase “The map is not the territory” is very influential. Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is named that way because of Korzybski usage of the term neuro-linguistic. NLP is based on general semantics but it evolved a lot from that point. NLP is today an influential intellectual framework outside of the academic mainstream.
I could imagine some good reasons for doing so. Sometimes scientists who are experts in one field become crackpots in another field, and it may be dificult for the new colleagues to argue against them if the crackpot can euler them by using the arguments from their old field.
On the other hand, there is the saying that a map is not the territory, and this seems like suggesting that the existing maps can be modified in the middle, but the boundaries are fixed. But we have already seen e.g. computer science appearing at the boundary of mathematics; biochemistry appearing on the border between biology and chemistry; or game theory somewhere at the intersection of mathematics, economy, and psychology.
My argument is primarily about whether that historical development was good or bad. It was that there are reasons why certain memes won over others that aren’t directly about the merit of the memes. Additionally I make the prognosis that those reasons are less likely to hold in the next 40 years the way they did in the last 40.
Today computer science is very much a subfield of math. Heinz von Foerster had a psychatrist in his Biological Computer Laboratory. He wanted to study computing, system theory, cybernetics or whatever word you want to use broadly.
The Biological Computer Laboratory was shut down when the military came to the point of deciding that funding it doesn’t produce militarily useful results.
As far as I know we don’t have professors for game theory as a discipline. We have economic professors who study game theory, mathematics professors who study it and psychology professors who study it. We don’t have departments of game theory.
Never heard of Circling until your post. Looked it up, initially find nothing going on in San Diego (California US). I wonder if it is more of a European thing?
If you know how I can find something local to San Diego CA US, please let me know.
Likely strong factors include:
Ease of applicability. If the average middle manager cannot apply a technique easily or straightforwardly while working, the major pressure to use a technique will be social signalling (cf. corporate buzzword speak).
Measurable outcomes. If the average middle manager cannot easily observe that the technique makes her job easier (either the productivity of subordinates or her control over them), then she will have no reason to emotionally or intellectually invest in the technique.
Becoming a niche is a third possibility if ideas are suitable to one area but hard to expand to different areas.
I do think rationality is a niche. I had a conversation with a not-particularly-bright administrative assistant at work where she expressed the teachings of Jehovah’s Witness as straightforward truth. She talked some of the chaos of her life (drugs, depression) before joining them. As I expressed the abstract case for, essentially, being careful about what one believes, it seemed clear enough to me that she had little or nothing to gain by being “right” (or rather adopting my opinion which is more likely to be true in a Bayesian sense) and she seemed to fairly clearly have something to lose. I, on the other hand, have a philosopho-physicist’s values and also value finding regular (non-theological) truths by carefully rejecting my biases, so I was making a choice that (probably) makes sense for me.
When my 14 year old daughter (now 16 and doing much better) was “experimenting” with alcohol, marijuana, and shop-lifting, I had a “come to Jesus” talk with my religious cousin. She told me that I knew right from wrong and that I was doing my daughter no favors by teaching her skepticism above morality. I decided she was essentially correct, and that some of my own “skepticism” was actually self-serving, letting me off the hook for some stealing I had done from employers starting when I was about 15.
I view rationality as a thing we can do with our neocortex. But clearly we have a functional emotional brain that “knows” there are monsters or tigers when we are afraid of the dark and “knows” that girls we are attracted to are also attracted to us. I continue to question whether I am doing myself or my children any real favors by being as devoted to this particular feature of my neocortex as I am.
Without numbers it sounds more like a sales pitch rather a honest analysis.
I think that’s a reasonable position for a preface to take.
I had a comparable impression from reading Cybernetics (at least the parts I got to so far) and other books on system theory.
I think cybernetics the practice / math is alive and well, even if cybernetics the name is mostly discarded. Take a look at Wiener’s wiki page:
The right way to read that is that it’s used in seven fields, not zero.
Cybernetics is alive but I think it’s misleading to call it well. When talking about an issue like weight loss the dominating paradigm is “calories in, calories out” and not a cybernetics inspired paradigm.
We don’t live in a world where any scale on the market allows automatic calculating of the moving averages of the hacker diet.
Quantified Self as movement is based on Cybernetics. At first European conference Gary spoke about how cybernetics is not well.
I had an old professor in university who taught physiology based on regulation system thinking (cybernetics but he didn’t use the word cybernetics). According to him there’s was no textbook that presents that perspective we could use for the course.
So it seems like cybernetics was dissected and some of its parts were digested by various disciplines, but the original spirit which connected those parts together was lost.
An analogy for the rationality movement would be if in a few decades some of the CFAR or MIRI lessons will become accepted material in pedagogics, physics, or maybe even AI research, but the whole spirit of “tsuyoku naritai” will be forgotten.
Some parts that I guess are likely to survive, because they can fit in the existing education:
treating emotions as rational or irrational depending on whether they relate to facts (psychology)
planning fallacy (management)
illusion of transparency (pedagogics)
Some parts that I guess are likely to be ignored, because they seem too trivial, and don’t fit to the existing educational system. They may be mentioned as a footnote in philosophy, but they will not be noticed, because philosophy already contains millions of mostly useless ideas:
making beliefs pay rent
noticing confusion
fake explanations
mysterious answers
affective spirals
fallacy of grey
dissolving the question
tsuyoku naritai
rationality as a common cause of many causes
EDIT: Reading my lists again, seems like the main difference is between things you can describe and things you have to do. The focus of academia is to describe stuff, not to train people. Which makes sense, sure. Except for the paradoxical part where you have to train people to become better at correctly describing stuff.
I haven’t read the book, but looking at the reviews on the page you linked...
That’s like Eliezer from a parallel universe, except that in this parallel universe the alternative Eliezer was a professor of mathematics at MIT.
Not everything that has ‘semantics’ written on it is ‘general semantics’. The academic seminars on semantics rather see themselves in the tradition of linguistics.
Yes. That assertion threw up a red flag that the author was overstating the importance of the methodology.