As a teenager totally unattached to the larger software community (and open source, until years later), the New Hacker’s DIctionary and the appended stories, along with Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg were formative for me. I had absolutely no contact with this culture, but I knew I wanted in. Finding that it overlaps with LessWrong, which I found independently later on, honestly feels bizarre.
Now I’m wondering if it’s less that hacker culture as presented in those stories was attractive to me in itself, than if there was a common factor shining through. Interesting people, reasonable people...!
Probably, but there is something else more subtle.
Both the cultures you’re pointing at are, essentially, engines to support achieving right mindset. It’s not quite the same right mindset, but in either case you have to detach for “normal” thinking and its unquestioned assumptions in order to be efficient at the task around which the culture is focused.
Thus, in both cultures there’s a kind of implicit mysticism. If you recoil from that word because you associate it with anti-rationality I can’t really blame you, but I ask you to consider the idea of mysticism as “techniques for consciousness alteration” detached from any particular beliefs about the universe.
This is why both cultures a have a use for Zen. It is a very well developed school of mystical technique whose connection to religious belief has become tenuous. You can take the Buddhism out of it and the rest is still coherent and interesting.
Perhaps this implicit mysticism is part of the draw for you. It is for me.
As a teenager totally unattached to the larger software community (and open source, until years later), the New Hacker’s DIctionary and the appended stories, along with Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg were formative for me. I had absolutely no contact with this culture, but I knew I wanted in. Finding that it overlaps with LessWrong, which I found independently later on, honestly feels bizarre.
Now I’m wondering if it’s less that hacker culture as presented in those stories was attractive to me in itself, than if there was a common factor shining through. Interesting people, reasonable people...!
Probably, but there is something else more subtle.
Both the cultures you’re pointing at are, essentially, engines to support achieving right mindset. It’s not quite the same right mindset, but in either case you have to detach for “normal” thinking and its unquestioned assumptions in order to be efficient at the task around which the culture is focused.
Thus, in both cultures there’s a kind of implicit mysticism. If you recoil from that word because you associate it with anti-rationality I can’t really blame you, but I ask you to consider the idea of mysticism as “techniques for consciousness alteration” detached from any particular beliefs about the universe.
This is why both cultures a have a use for Zen. It is a very well developed school of mystical technique whose connection to religious belief has become tenuous. You can take the Buddhism out of it and the rest is still coherent and interesting.
Perhaps this implicit mysticism is part of the draw for you. It is for me.