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kodos96 comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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No way, I don't buy this one at all. I find that most little kids are essentially naive liberals. We should give poor sick people free medicine! We should stop bad polluters from hurting birds and trees! Conservatism/libertarianism is the contrarian position. Everything has a cost! There are no free lunches! Managerial-technocratic liberals are the meta-contrarians. So what about the costs? We've got 800 of the smartest guys from Yarvard and Oxbridge to do cost-benefit analyses for us!
Of course there are meta-meta-contrarians as well: reactionaries, meta-libertarians (Patri Friedman is a good example of a metalibertarian IMO), anarchists, etc.
It's contrarians all the way down.
I think the takeaway from this is just that classification of phenomena into these triads is a very subjective business. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since the point of this (if I'm reading Yvain correctly) is not to determine the correctness of a position by its position in a triad, but simply to encourage people to notice when their own thinking is motivated by a desire to climb the triad, rather than pursue truth, and to be skeptical of yourself when you detect yourself trying to triad-climb.