This is NOT a thread to debate the merits of Scientology or of religion in general.
The current attitude in the nerd community regarding Scientology seems to be overwhelmingly negative.
When I look at Scientology, I see a few things that seem, well, awfully nerdy. There is doctrine that appears very Science Fiction, and some officially published resources appear that they might be inspired by Computer Science. For example, multivolume sets published by the CoS start with volume 0 (cf. 0 based arrays), and the Dianetics model of the mind looks awfully like the model of a computer architecture. Hubbard seems to have taken the processor, memory bank, and input and output model and tried to explain the brain as just one big complex computer.
Was there ever a nerd connection? Was Hubbard ever a programmer, hacker, or other IT guru? Was Scientology ever popular at SF conventions or among programmers?
You have to remember that the first article describing Dianetics was published by John W. Campbell in ASF. So separating Scitology and nerds is going to be difficult.
Replace nerds with “socially awkward people that desperately want to belong to a group and feel special”. Such people are prime cult recruitment material, theres plenty of them in nerd-dom, but more than that: I think what ever else you might say about Hubbard he had a brilliant grasp of psychology and manipulation and Scientology was designed to be as appealing as possible to all kinds of desperate seekers, not just nerdy ones.
A wild-ass speculation but I was reading about Gnostic beliefs and it seemed to me that there were parallels to some Scientologist beliefs. The reason I think that’s interesting is because there was a revival in public interest about Gnosticism with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946 and their translation in the next few years. And Hubbard became writing the basics of Scientology in this same time period (he first began publishing them in 1952).
I might go so far to say most nerdy types have developed a keen sense of skepticism to not be drawn into such obviously Star Trek level absurdities. Were it presented as complete fiction, then he might have a fan base.
Nerds have a tendency to nitpick over excruciating details.
Not when he started the religion. He had already introduced “dianetics” and realized that making it a religion had tax advantages.
Hubbard was a decent writer in the 40s – “Fear” and “Typewriter in the Sky” were good stories for their time – but he spent 25 years out of the field and when he published **Battlefield Earth/B] and Mission Earth, his work was hopelessly dated.
They always have a table with Tubbard’s crappy fiction and phony therapies in the dealer’s room at Worldcon. They are studiously ignored by all in attendance.
I don’t know how it was in the old days, but now they are pariahs in geekdom.
I disagree totally. Galaxy and F&SF were far classier and far more in tune with the times. Campbell had turned Astounding into a bizarre club for the faithful. Most of the major writers either left entirely or severely diminished their appearances there.
There were only the three major magazines so Astounding still had an equivalent, maybe greater, readership. But Campbell’s increasing crankhood - he did endless articles on psionics and the Dean anti-gravity machine in addition to Dianetics - meant that intelligent fans were backing away at supersonic speeds throughout the 50s.
As for the OP, Hubbard had no more knowledge of computers than of any other science. He used the term a few times in Dianetics, but obviously just as a scientific buzzword. No computer programmers existed in 1950 in any case. The barest handful of computers did. There’s no connection at all that I’ve ever heard of between Hubbard and computers.
Scientologists may well have continued to adopt current buzzwords into their writings. Everybody does. The metaphor of the brain as a computer is extremely common. I don’t see it going any further than that.
No, there weren’t. There were people, usually women, who flipped switches on the ENIAC. This was not a profession. It was a handful. They are not programmers anymore than the earlier women who did the gruntwork of calculations and were called computers were programmers. These women are historically interesting, certainly, but they have nothing to do with what the OP is talking about.
Thing is, the end result of Scientology is kind of hivish/drony. Nerds and geeks, in general, tend to be non-conformists, which is not really a good fit for a doctrinaire organization. And, really, you do not get to the sci-fi-type material until well into the OT levels (there is some really goofy stuff in the NOTs). And, of course, clearing is pretty expensive, nerds and geeks are not known for being well-off on their own.
My brother convinced me to read through Dianetics, and I just cannot see how the nerd/geek types would be drawn to that: it is a tedious, repetitive, uninspiring slog that seems to be a brain cudgel more than any kind of inspirational text.
I tried to look through that book in a thrift store. Couldn’t handle more than a paragraph without getting a headache because my brain simply couldn’t cope with understanding what I was reading. Looked to me like samples I’ve seen of the “word salad” associated with some forms of mental illness.
He spent IDK 10K words rambling on about failed coat-hanger abortions and the traumatic in-utero effects of a woman’s orgasms. Then, when you think he is about to move on to something new, he circles back to that again. At least, that was the impression I got from it.
The insight I got from that book was the hypnotic effect of massive volumes of verbosity. Every time I try to listen to a long speech, I feel like the speaker is trying to drag me into a weakened state where I might be more likely to accept what he has to say.
There was a continuous tradition of women doing the following jobs:
Computers (i.e., people who calculated on paper long problems or compiled mathematical tables), following the vague requests of men who got paid more
People who flipped switches on early computers to get them to do calculations, following the vague requests of men who got paid more
People who wrote computer commands on punch cards and fed them to computers, following the vague requests of men who got paid more
These were all essentially the same thing. Men made vague requests to lower-level women (who were all quite smart, but who couldn’t get hired for the good jobs) about solving certain mathematical equations. The women did the work of converting these requests into actual calculations for themselves, and later for the machines, to do. Many of them called themselves programmers, and they have a continuous tradition with the computers programmers of today. At the point that the men in charge realized that programming was actually a mentally rigorous job, they started recruiting men into the field and paying them a reasonable wage.
Crazy like a fox. I lived through this, so maybe I know something. First place, Dianetics was published in ASF (Astounding Science Fiction) around 1950 and I read it there at the time. It sounded like BS to me, but I was only 13, so what did I know? I don’t think the original article mentioned going back to former lives, which would have really put me off. John Campbell, the editor of ASF, sounded convinced, although I doubt he ever became a Scientologist. He was arguably crazy, but a damned good editor and you could ignore his mishogoshim.
Many years later, I read that various Sci-Fi writers had reported that sometime, say, in 1949, L. Ron Hubbard had said that writing Sci-Fi was poorly paid (it was–typically stories would sell for between 1/2 and 1 cent a word. Campbell paid 1 c, but you would get a bonus, I think another 1/2 c if the readers voted it the best story of the issue). So a serialized 60,000 word novel would get you a while $600. Anyway, L. Ron went on to say that if you really wanted to make money you should start a religion. Now dianetics was not presented as a religion, not in ASF anyway, and I was surprised (not knowing the back story) that it had become one. But no, L. Ron wasn’t crazy, just a typical entrepreneur who saw his opportunity and ran with it. And tax-exempt too. His adherents, on the other hand,…
I wrote COBOL programs that were fed into computers via punch cards. I was most definitely doing programming, and I was most definitely a man, and the requests were more than vague.
I think you’re thinking of a slightly later era; ASF remained a prestigious and desired venue until around 1960, at which point JWC’s cracks really started to show. Many of the writers who left, like Heinlein, had moved into the far more profitable world of books, which didn’t exist as such for sf until around 1950.
No question that F&SF was the most literate, and Galaxy had a leg up on ASF gained as the 50’s progressed, but I’ll maintain than ASF was the center of the general nerd universe at the time.