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Comment by Procrastes | Hacker News Reader

I'm someone who used to use this phrase frequently after reading Feynman, but stopped long ago after realizing how lazy the story was. It became a popular phrase with the same crowd it most closely described. That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense. I guess the real revelation is that Orwell was the prophet of our own little apocalypse.

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> That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense

wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)

Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product called Flavor-Aid.

When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!

I hear this used all the time with various meanings ranging from "being fully committed" to "being brainwashed". It usually implies a naive level of (or just misplaced) zeal but I feel like folks rarely mean the suicidal/homicidal part which can make the phrase quite shocking if you actually think about what is being said. Language and culture are weird.

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