Scott Alexander, RAW fan and RAW critic

Thomas Bayes, although apparently there's a high probability this isn't him. See here. 

Scott Alexander is a popular Internet pundit. He formerly had a blog called Slate Star Codex; he currently has a popular Substack newsletter called Astral Codex Ten. 

He is both a fan of Robert Anton Wilson's writing, and a critic of treating RAW as a one-stop-shop guru for people interested in mysticism and occult practices.

First, let me address a recent reference.

I always look forward to Alexander's monthly "Links" column, which never fails to include many interesting items. The latest one for September had this item:

"4: List Of Groups Who Protested The Democratic Convention (also continued on second tweet). This is real, but it reminds me of those multi-page shaggy-dog-joke lists of fictional bands or fictional conspiracies or something in Robert Anton Wilson books."'

This is is double reference to Illuminatus!, as Scott is referencing the bands attending the music festival and also referencing the demonstrations at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention that feature in the work (Wilson and Shea both participated in peace demonstrations). 

The same "Links" piece also has this phrase: "Indeed do many things come to pass." (Item 43). 

All of that made me wonder if Scott is currently re-reading Illuminatus!, and he answered when I fired off an email: "Nah, but I did enjoy it quite a lot last time I read it a few years ago."

This leads me into my second link, "Against Anton-Wilsonism," a 2013 piece which argues that you can't really know mysticism, or occultism, or any other practice by reading even as skillful a writer as Robert Anton Wilson, you have to actively master the subject. I don't think RAW would disagree. Here is an excerpt:

"There are certain fields where it’s really obvious to everyone that learning about the field is different from learning the field. There are probably historians of music who have never picked up an instrument, and they don’t fancy themselves musicians. And political scientists don’t delude themselves into thinking they would make great politicians.

"Mysticism is not one of these fields (rationality isn’t either, but that’s a different blog article). Because so much of mysticism revolves around the idea of the gnosis, a specific kind of knowledge, it’s easy to mistake knowledge of mysticism for the knowledge that mysticism tries to produce."

You really need to read the whole thing. 

Another point pops up in the comments. BenSix writes, "I love Anton Wilson’s writings but the agnosticism that he promoted can become a dogma itself. One can grow too comfortable in answering truth claims with 'maybe', and avoid the difficult business of working out whether it would be more appropriate to say 'yes' or ]no'." Scott responds, "I reread some of Robert Anton Wilson a year or so ago, and it all just looked like “Look at me, I don’t understand Bayesian probability, I’m going to pretend that 1% chance of truth is equivalent to 99% chance of truth and totally drive off an epistemological cliff!' ”

St. Rev responds, "It’s fair to criticize Wilson for not grasping Bayes’ theorem, though my impression is that Bayesianism has only risen to prominence among schools of null-A logics in the last 10-20-odd years, and most of RAW’s important work was done in the 70s and 80s. (It would be fairer to criticize him for garbling Shannon!) But he was quite good at applying Korzybski, and your 99%-1% characterization is unfair. What RAW did say explicitly, in various contexts, was that he rated likelihood of propositions on a scale of 1 to 9, and if he found himself at 0 or 10 he’d look for a counterargument until he reached 1 or 9 again. RAW didn’t have our analytic foundation for probabilistic thinking, but he wasn’t a nihilist and it’s absurd to say so."

Perhaps this can be related to Michael Huemer's criticism, mentioned a few days ago, that Wilson apparently isn't actually totally familiar with Aristotle,  or to the oddity, which I've mentioned before, that Wilson writes a great deal about skepticism but (as far as I can remember) never mentions Pyrrho and Pyrrhonism. 

At the start of the piece, Alexander writes that "Back when I was in college, I loved stuff by Robert Anton Wilson." And in the comments in the piece, he writes, "I love Robert Anton Wilson as an author for the same reason I love Carl Sagan as a science personality. This post was in no way meant to say he was a bad author, role model, or source of fascinating ideas."