Leary–Lettvin Debate | Hacker News Reader

Leary–Lettvin Debate

en.wikipedia.org

29 pointsbenbreen5 comments

I found a link to a video with a large portion of the debate[1], though I can't vouch for whether watching it is worthwhile. From quickly comparing bits of it to a transcript[2], it seems like at least some of the debate has been cut out. However, to the video's credit, it does have the full visual effects of Leary's presentation in color.

[1] http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_0669B2FE8ADC4F80A8D89CB5... [2] https://www.swt.org/oshare/Lettvin-Leary/Lettvin-Leary-LSD-D...

I can't tell if it is a good thing or a bad thing that Wikipedia has an entire article on a university debate from 1967 that was televised locally.

Im sure there are Twitter wars between intellectuals everyday that reach a farther audience.

I'm not 100% against it - but seems a bit odd.

Audience size isn’t important, doesn’t make an event more or less notable or have more or less impact long term.

Tim Leary was very impactful and in a negative way to the potential benefits of psychedelics because he got carried away with the tendency to turn the drugs into a sort of religion.

> Tim Leary was very impactful and in a negative way to the potential benefits of psychedelics because he got carried away with the tendency to turn the drugs into a sort of religion.

That’s not right. Leary recommended that people and their close associates start their own “religions”. This, he felt, was now possible because widely available holotropic substances could serve the gnostic (as in gnosis, not Christian Gnosticism) and mystical functions of these “religions”.

To each their own. The only sources on it cited in the Wikipedia article are from the Harvard Crimson student newspaper and a book on Lettvin. Seems as if it was influential in the debate around drugs that it would be in multiple established newspapers or books about drug legalization.

I guess I'm just skeptical of the notable or impactful nature of this at all.

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