Thanks for the elaboration. I agree with the comparative aspects.
For 1), I’d say that although Korzybski was a painfully tedious windbag in Science and Sanity, I’ve seen lots of summaries that were concise and well written, though I don’t remember a comprehensive summary of Science and Sanity that fits the bill.
I was mainly getting at 3), with order of abstraction, multi ordinal terms, and the concrete practices of semantic hygiene such as indexing, etc,. and hyphenated non-elementalism.
I’d add to your list that Korzybski’s aversion to the izzes of identity and predication, along with his intensional vs. extensional distinction, really complement Tabooing a Word and Replacing the Symbol with the Substance. AK elaborates the full evaluative response—the intensional response—of a flesh and blood creature, identifies particularly problematic semantic practices which maladaptively evoke that response, and EY gives the practical method for semantic hygiene in terms of what you should be doing instead.
AK always keeps in views the abstracting nervous system in a way that EY doesn’t, and it think that added reductionism helps. A reductionist model which includes the salient points of human abstraction provides a generative method to make sense of the series of narratives that EY provides on different points on rationality.
Also, AK’s insistence on a physical structural differential, and knowledge based in the structure of various sensory modalities is really a gusher of good ideas.
AK stays closer to the wetware, and whatever the relative limits of science available to him, I think that reductionist focus works to provide a deep model for thinking about abstraction. Focus on a reductionist physical reality, and all sorts of supposed conundrums for speciation, life, and mind evaporate.
I’ve been going off on this because there’s just a ton of material from AK on semantic hygiene, which I take as a core method of getting Less Wrong, and all I usually see mentioned on this list is “The Map is not the Territory”. That’s maybe a country in the world of AK, and I think people should do some travelling and see the rest of his world. There’s a lot more to see.
Thanks for the elaboration. I agree with the comparative aspects.
For 1), I’d say that although Korzybski was a painfully tedious windbag in Science and Sanity, I’ve seen lots of summaries that were concise and well written, though I don’t remember a comprehensive summary of Science and Sanity that fits the bill.
I was mainly getting at 3), with order of abstraction, multi ordinal terms, and the concrete practices of semantic hygiene such as indexing, etc,. and hyphenated non-elementalism.
I’d add to your list that Korzybski’s aversion to the izzes of identity and predication, along with his intensional vs. extensional distinction, really complement Tabooing a Word and Replacing the Symbol with the Substance. AK elaborates the full evaluative response—the intensional response—of a flesh and blood creature, identifies particularly problematic semantic practices which maladaptively evoke that response, and EY gives the practical method for semantic hygiene in terms of what you should be doing instead.
AK always keeps in views the abstracting nervous system in a way that EY doesn’t, and it think that added reductionism helps. A reductionist model which includes the salient points of human abstraction provides a generative method to make sense of the series of narratives that EY provides on different points on rationality.
Also, AK’s insistence on a physical structural differential, and knowledge based in the structure of various sensory modalities is really a gusher of good ideas.
AK stays closer to the wetware, and whatever the relative limits of science available to him, I think that reductionist focus works to provide a deep model for thinking about abstraction. Focus on a reductionist physical reality, and all sorts of supposed conundrums for speciation, life, and mind evaporate.
I’ve been going off on this because there’s just a ton of material from AK on semantic hygiene, which I take as a core method of getting Less Wrong, and all I usually see mentioned on this list is “The Map is not the Territory”. That’s maybe a country in the world of AK, and I think people should do some travelling and see the rest of his world. There’s a lot more to see.