DSimon comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong

147 Post author: Yvain 13 September 2010 09:36PM

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Comment author: Apprentice 13 September 2010 11:57:46PM 8 points [-]

One more cluster I can think of is attitude to copyright law. Something like:

  1. Huh? It's illegal for me to copy that song? How totally stupid, I'm not harming anyone.
  2. Strong intellectual property law is necessary to encourage innovation and protect artists.
  3. Copyright law does more harm than good and needs to be reformed or abolished.
Comment author: Relsqui 14 September 2010 04:54:13AM 8 points [-]

This is actually an interesting example, because I think if you look at the patterns of contrarian and meta-contrarian groups--that is, the people who tend to prefer those attitudes--you actually flip the second two, which breaks the pattern of contradiction and counter-contradiction. That is to say,

  1. (ordinary people who don't worry too much about this) Huh? It's illegal for me to copy that song? How totally stupid, I'm not harming anyone.
  2. (people who are really into the torrent community) It's not/shouldn't be illegal! Information wants to be free!
  3. (meta) If nobody paid for music, no one could live off being a musician. Torrenters are just making excuses for the convenience of breaking the law.
  4. (approaching sense) We need to reform or abolish copyright law and replace it with a system that pays artists fairly while working with, not against, new technology.

At least, that's my experience; take it with a grain of bias in favor of position four.

Comment author: DSimon 14 September 2010 02:38:26PM 3 points [-]

That's an interesting example because 1 and 2 arrive at the same conclusion, but 2 might still want to signal themselves as being contrary to 1 (i.e. "It's not just that it's not harming anybody, but sharing information around freely is actually helping everybody!")

Comment author: Relsqui 14 September 2010 07:26:41PM 3 points [-]

I agree with that, and you make a good point--it suggests that being contrarian doesn't require disagreeing with the position as disagreeing with the reasoning. In a lot of cases it'll amount to the same thing, or at least come off as the same thing, but the above is one where it doesn't.

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