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Mercy comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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I'm a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn't novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn't convey information, I can't see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn't be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it's controversy.
In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.
Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between "all sex is rape" and "pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon" in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.
Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that's further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it's real Laius, socialism.
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from "it's not happening" to "well we didn't do it" to "well we can't do anything about it without doing more harm than good" should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the "straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority" variety, give us a bit of pause. If there's any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.
On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I'd like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?
Why do you want to define "genuine meta-contrarianness" based on correctness/merit? It will cause endless flamewars. Yvain's recipe, on the other hand, is relatively uncontroversial.
As far as I can see, it's uncontroversial because it doesn't add any information in the first place, compared to just including the norm in question when describing something as contrarian, which takes a similar number of words, less effort and is less subjective.
But I'm not suggesting double contrarian opinions must be better than unrecontructed ones, rather that if they are distinguishable they should have different bottom lines: they shouldn't just be better arguments for the same thing. We see this in the race example: modern genetics recognises very different ethnic distributions to those of classical racialist science, or modern derivations thereof.
I think the post was a guideline to help you catch yourself when you write the bottom line of your position for signaling reasons (contrarian or meta-contrarian). If you never experience that problem, more power to you. I do have it and the post was helpful to me.
Hah, I'm sure I do, I guess the point then is that just because your position is counter-revolutionary, doesn't mean you haven't adopted it out of rebelliousness. Um, assuming that revolutionary zeal as a potential source of bottom lines was taken for granted. I think I knew that already, if only through hatred of South Park style antagonistic third way-ism, and so have spent these last few responses training on straw.