Gurjieff was a new-age guru, a mystic, who taught a "Way" to find enlightenment with no scientific basis, or any other basis than the fact that he came up with it and managed to convince people to give him money to be taught it.
There is nothing there to engage in a "deep", rational manner. Are the guidelines supposed to protect "work" like that also? Should we spend time and energy carefully rebuffing every psychic, UFOlogist and astrologist, who is linked on HN, also? Or should we accept such articles as if they have something useful to contribute, just because someone took the time to write them?
I disagree. Articles like this do have something interesting to contribute. They're for sure of historical interest, and to some subset of readers, perennial interest. Gurdjieff was a fascinating character who attracted an astonishing circle of followers. You've heard about the obscenity trial of Ulysses? Jane Heap was the publisher who got tried for it [1]. A.R. Orage was T.S. Eliot's favorite editor. These people were at the heart of 20th century modernism. Before that, his Russian followers were at the heart of the Silver Age, an equally interesting period. Words like "charlatan" and "guru" don't open any of that up—they shut all of it down.
No post gratifies everyone's curiosity. When something fails to reach yours, please just find something more interesting to read. There are lots of choices on the front page and endlessly more at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and https://news.ycombinator.com/front. Please don't rush in with shallow dismissals when something irritates you: that doesn't gratify intellectual curiosity. Worse, it leads to poor-quality discussion—so its signal-noise-lowering impact goes beyond just a single comment.
Yes, Gurdjieff's pupils were famous artists and intellectuals of their time.
It is striking, reading his wikipedia page, how much of it is devoted to the
account of who joined his circle, who travelled with him when he moved, who
left his circle, etc. There is as much focus on Gurdjieff's pupils as on
Gurdjieff himself.
Still, that makes him a guru with famous pupils. In fact, he is probably still
remembered today because he had such famous pupils; certainly not because of
his teachings or any kind of personal contribution to knowledge.
He clearly must have been a charismatic figure to gather all those people
around him. Nobody becomes a cult leader by being boring and bland! But,
charisma and imagination are gifts squandered if they are spent cooking up
some ad-hoc "path to enlightenment" with the only purpose of seducing people
into becoming your faithful followers. It is exploitative to use one's gift to
inspire, only to steal your "students" time, to force them to believe your
every word, follow you around and practice your silly little "system" in hopes
of becoming "enlightened"- to promise everything when you have nothing.
I also know well the impact that meeting such a man can have: one becomes
bound to them, perhaps for life. Having once basked at the glow of the Master, you can check out but you can never leave. Like human
opiates, they offer brief pleasure and take everything from you in return,
holding you captive with false promises and empty dreams. It is not they who
are fascinating. It's the tendency of the human mind to fall down holes,
forever.
No account of Gurdjieff's life is complete if it does not put the fact of what
he really was, left right and centre. Especially not if it detracts from that
fact with such exhuberant praise as the article above.
How do you put scientific basis for enlightenment? Most of the people who have claimed to have a path towards enlightenment have focused on the mind and that too remains private to the practitioner. If it adds value to the seeker's experience or gives someone more clarity, then that method has gained popularity and acceptance. You don't see a scientific basis for his methods but your opinion is not based on experience either. It is indeed a shallow dismissal.
It's not obvious to me from the provided quote that he's a charlatan. I do think he is a charlatan, but not everyone who uses new-age-sounding language is necessarily a charlatan.
It's possible to put many of the scientifically validated insights of modern psychotherapy into language that would make a lot of empirically-minded people sneer. In fact there are people who have done exactly this in the past.
I think you miss the point a bit. The guidelines here are not unlike Gurdjieff's movements: formalism disguised as a practice of enlightenment. If your comment included something like "Lorem Ipsum's maxim from the 16th century was an example of this method being rhetorical and counter-productive", you would not have been taken to task because it would appear intellectual, even if it's nonsense.
The HN guidelines are very reasonable and they have created one of the least unpleasant discussion boards on the entire internet (and I mean, historically).
The particular guideline that dang brought up makes a lot of sense. I don't understand why he applied it in this case, but as a guideline, it's sound and solid.
This is a bit like saying that Big Brother created the ultimate utopia, all they had to do was take away individualism and impose guidelines. I agree that it's quite effective, but still doesn't root out that thorn called humanity. The harsh but necessary enforcement efforts are undertaken out of view, leading one to believe that guidelines are responsible for the present social reform; but only so much as the Newspeak dictionary was for Ingsoc.
I'd say it starts with the content. Some content is clearly going to cause conflict, and you've got stuff in place to catch some of it. More severe curating of content will help reduce this further.
Then there's the actual human interaction. We suck at communicating; adding tools to improve communication would help the discussions stay calmer.
Finally, there's the in-group mentality where people who perceive themselves as the same will act nicer to each other and perceive threats less often. By increasing the ways people can relate to each other, their empathy toward each other increases, communication becomes more friendly, and people try to work together more often.
Big Brother's approach was to attack all three of these areas rather than just create laws and police. It seems that utopian societies are a bit like gardens; if you want them to look really pretty, you'll have to do a lot of pruning.
There is nothing there to engage in a "deep", rational manner. Are the guidelines supposed to protect "work" like that also? Should we spend time and energy carefully rebuffing every psychic, UFOlogist and astrologist, who is linked on HN, also? Or should we accept such articles as if they have something useful to contribute, just because someone took the time to write them?