Eric Raymond's Shortform

I remember David Stove's What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts (1991) being discussed on early-LW, and being influenced by it. I don't really know whether this was an outlier-unusually-good essay, or the tip of an iceberg of good pre-LW less-wrongness.

I like getting a better understanding of our historical context, and I sort of expect you’d point me to some pretty interesting things I’ve not heard of before and could go read. And could convey to me a sense of times you know about better than I. So I’d be interested.

I don’t know if you mean describing how the world looked in 2006, or if you’re thinking of a broader history of the effort. I personally like to think of us as continuing the work laid out by Francis Bacon [LW · GW] and the Royal Society from 1660, and taking much of the spirit from great scientists along the way like Feynman and such.

This has a potential to be extremely cool.

Remembering that the ideology is not the movement, I would be interested in reading a history of both the ideas and the groups of people that formed around them. Especially, where are those parallel branches today, what have they achieved, what are they currently working on.

What is the reference group for the rationalist community, and what is their typical outcome? (My current guess is: "a strong personality becomes popular, gets many fans and publishes many books, coins one or two generally known idioms... then dies, and the fans keep talking about how awesome those books were, and that's all.")

This is an indication of interest in such.

It would definitely be neat to read a history of that sort. Having myself not read many of the books that Eliezer references as forerunners, that area of history is one that I at least would like to learn more about.

Just a note of thanks, for the essay (which I skimmed, and will read more thoroughly when I have more time), but more for all of your writing (and direct activity) regarding hacker culture.  

I hadn't really made the connection in my mind between the different domains of rational/skeptical/hacker thought until this - I'm between you and Eliezer in age, and have considered myself a hacker since the mid-80s, having read a different subset of historical thought - light on philosophy, very heavy on the SF that everyone references, but also Knuth and Hofstadter and Dijkstra which mixed philosophy of thinking with rigor of procedural execution.  

Anyway, thanks for this!  And for any other readers who aren't familiar with your work, check out the Rootless Root at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ .