gruseom

Related series from a decade ago:

https://billwadge.com/2011/04/27/lucid-the-dataflow-language...

https://billwadge.com/2011/12/06/lucid-into-the-abyss/

https://billwadge.com/2012/03/31/lucid-eduction/

https://billwadge.com/2012/04/15/lucid-retirement-plan/

Also, re "yes, that David May, then a grad student": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)

p.s. Bill, if you see this, your wordpress links in the current post all redirect to a login page.

> his theories of psychosis are considered nonsense these days

They were considered nonsense when he first put them out, too. That's what happens when you challenge a field at its foundations.

R.D. Laing is a major figure in the history of psychiatry and psychotherapy. His radical critique of how society treats the mentally ill, and advocacy for a more humane approach, are legendary. Laing was also a charismatic guy who became a celebrity of the 60s and 70s counterculture.

The most famous of Laing's experiments was Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists (though presumably they didn't use those terms) would live together, and where the focus was on helping through simple presence and relationship rather than techniques or treatments. Here is a striking, even astonishing story from one of the houses Laing started after Kingsley Hall: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-p.... I posted it here years ago, where it didn't get one upvote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6713259), but I still think it's one of the most interesting submissions I've made to HN.

The author of that piece, who at the time of the story was a young therapist enamored of Laing's approach, is now the founder of the new(ish) Gnosis Retreat Center in San Francisco, along with a bunch of other people who worked with Laing. Here he is talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4-lJWwwRc8#t=8m53s.

I think it's interesting that they are making a fresh start at reviving what Laing did, and that it's in San Francisco. That's why I posted this, though I certainly didn't mean to bork their server!

Can you say what similarities you've noticed between the two programs?

Here’s one passage I remember after many years: Byron explaining how convenient it was for schoolboys that the editors of the classics had thoughtfully collected all the obscene bits in one place. They were too prudish to leave them in the text, but too scholarly to delete them altogether.

  Juan was taught from out the best edition,
    Expurgated by learnéd men, who place
  Judiciously, from out the schoolboy's vision,
    The grosser parts; but, fearful to deface
  Too much their modest bard by this omission,
    And pitying sore his mutilated case,
  They only add them all in an appendix,
  Which saves, in fact, the trouble of an index;

  For there we have them all "at one fell swoop,"
    Instead of being scatter'd through the Pages;
  They stand forth marshall'd in a handsome troop,
    To meet the ingenuous youth of future ages,
  Till some less rigid editor shall stoop
    To call them back into their separate cages,
  Instead of standing staring all together,
  Like garden gods—and not so decent either.