Dianetics, the modern science of mental health
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, sometimes abbreviated as DMSMH, is a book by L. Ron Hubbard describing a pseudoscientific set of ideas, Dianetics, that would later become part of Scientology. Hubbard claimed to have developed it from a combination of personal experience, basic principles of Eastern philosophy and the work of Sigmund Freud. The book is considered part of Scientology's canon. It is colloquially referred to by Scientologists as Book One. Published in 1950, the book launched the movement that Hubbard later characterized as a religion. As of 2013, the Scientology organization's publishing arm, New Era Publications, sells the book in English and in 50 other languages.
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2019–2023years
33% recommend33% neutral33% critical
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- So many!
- Never Split the Difference
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- Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
- The thing you have to realize is this is a cult. Like Scientology they are always inventing new language that's designed to make insiders become incapable of communicating with outsiders.
Sequences is like Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, something that ensures real critical thinkers don't feel welcome.
This article contains numerous features that conform to the style guide for lesswrong including: (1) spammy crossposting for SEO (even good sites like arstechnica and phys.org do this today), (2) trigger warnings ("more technical than usual"), (3) random bits of praise for the cult leader (now EY is a "literary critic" but he's going to be a war hero like L. Ron Hubbard one of these days.)
Apocalyptic talk like theirs is dangerous: it's the road to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_gro...
I do appreciate the shout out to structuralism, maybe they have been reading what I've written. Structuralism was a fad that dated to when linguistics was pre-paradigmatic and people thought language was a model for everything else. After Chomsky developed a paradigm for linguistics that turned out to be a disappointment (could be applied to make languages like FORTRAN but couldn't be used to make computers understand language, privileged syntax at the expense of semantics, etc.) the remnants moved on to post-structuralism.
The spectacular success of ChatGPT and transformers in general (e.g. they work for vision too!) has made "language is all you need" seem a much more appealing viewpoint, certainly it is a paradigm which people can use to write a number of papers as well as hot takes, fanfics and other subacademic communications.
- Yes, nothing at all to do with Paul Allen, the wires just crossed in my brain. No I don't think it's anything like separating songs from their creators. L. Ron Hubbard conducted seminars on Dianetics and later authored the self-help book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. As you probably know, he later went on to found the church of scientology. I am a programmer not a journalist so this is as far as I'll go. I think the moral of the story is don't take these books as gospel and don't treat them as your bible.
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