I also recently noticed this triad:
Seek sex + money / pursue only pure truth and virtue / seek sex + money
To be fair, I think that this triad is largely a function of the sort of society one lives in. It could be summarized as "submit to virtuous social orders, seek to dominate non-virtuous ones if you have the ability to discern between them"
Implementing your suggestion is easy. Just keep going "meta" until your opinions become stupid, then set meta = meta - 1.
There's an art to knowing when;
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes & then
20 seconds less.
I'm reminded of some "advice" I read about making money in the stock market:
Buy a stock, wait until it goes up, and then sell it. If it doesn't go up, then don't have bought it.
That comment made me smile. I didn't upvote it, but I just hid a paperclip, making the moment when I'll have to buy another box that much closer.
edit: actually, I wrote the above before I actually did it. But when I looked in the place I expected to find paperclips, and didn't find any, making the probability that I'll buy paperclips in the near future somewhat higher. So it's all good.
One more time: the fact that those beliefs are in an order does not mean some of them are good and others are bad. For example, "5 year old child / pro-death / transhumanist" is a triad, and "warming denier / warming believer / warming skeptic" is a triad, but I personally support 1+3 in the first triad and 2 in the second. You can't evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!
Well worth stressing.
It's possible to go meta on nearly any issue, and there are a lot of meta-level arguments - group affiliation, signaling, rationalization, ulterior motives, whether a position is contrarian or supported by the majority, who the experts are and how much we should trust them, which group is persecuted the most, straw man positions and whether anybody really holds them, slippery slopes, different ways to interpret statements, who is working under which cognitive bias ...
Which is why I prefer discussions to stick to the object level rather than go meta. It's just too easy to rationalize a position in meta, and to find convincing-sounding arguments as to why the other side mistakenly disagrees with you. And meta-level disagreements are more likely to persist in the long run, because they are hard to verify.
Sure, meta-level arguments are very valuable in many cases, we shouldn't drop them altogether. But we should be very cautious while using them.
That's a triad too: naive instinctive signaling / signaling-aware people disliking signaling / signaling is actually a useful and necessary thing.
Going meta often introduces burdensome details. This will only lead you closer to truth when your epistemic rationality is strong enough to shoulder the weight.
One element of meta-contrarian reasoning is as follows. Consider a proposition P, that is hard for a layperson to assess. Because of this difficulty, an individual must rely on others for information. Now, a reasonable layperson might look around and listen with an open mind to all the arguments, and choose the one that seems most plausible to assign a probability to P.
The problem is that certain propositions have large corps of people whose professions depend on the proposition being true, but no counterforce of professional critics. So there is a large group of people (priests) who are professionally committed to the proposition "God exists". The existence of this group causes an obvious bias in the layperson's decision algorithm. Other groups, like doctors, economists, soldiers, and public school teachers, have similar commitments. Consider the proposition "public education improves national academic achievement." It could be true, it could be false - it's an empirical question. But all public school teachers are committed to this proposition, and there are very few people committed to the opposite.
So meta-contrarians explicitly correct for this kind of bias. I don't necessarily think that the public school proposition is false, but it should be thoroughly examined. I don't necessarily think that the nation would be safer if we abolished the Army and Marine Corps, but it might be.
The problem is that certain propositions have large corps of people whose professions depend on the proposition being true, but no counterforce of professional critics.
This really is a very good point.
I think this post speaks of an interesting signaling element in societal dialectics. Let's call your hypothesis the "contrarian signaling" hypothesis. But to me, your post also hints at a couple other hypotheses behind this behavior.
The first hypothesis is the mundane one: that people end up in this groups with positions contrary to other positions, because those are just the positions that are more plausible to them, and they decide their subcultures out of their actual tastes. The reason that people divide themselves into groups with contrary views is because people have different phenotypes. I'm sure you've already thought of it, but I want to say a little more about it.
Under this hypothesis, hipster are hipsters primarily because they like retro clothes (and other aspects of the culture). They would have worn these same clothes back when they were in fashion; whereas true contrarians wouldn't have. This might be easier to imagine with another overlapping subculture: hippies. Hippies don't idolize the 60's to be contrarian: they idolize the 60's because they like the ideals of the 60's and feel nostalgic for them.
Now, you may say that the 60's were a contrarian time (w...
But to me, your post also hints at a couple other hypotheses behind this behavior.
My reading of the post was not so much that it proposed contrarianism as an explanation for other cultural divisions, but that peoples' inclination towards a given level of contrarianism is itself a cultural division. We don't need to hypothesize about why people are metacontrarians; we're defining them by the habit of being metacontrary.
However, your hypotheses are still interesting in their own right. I predict that, were we to run your experiments, the first one would tend to describe the early adopters of a given subculture--the first hipster actually liked those dumb glasses, etc.--and later members would increasingly be described by the latter.
This is roughly what Gladwell's Tipping Point is about, actually.
check out this other cool belief Y!
I think that this is how all debates (and evangelism) should sound.
Here's a different hypothesis that also accounts for opinions reverting in the direction of the original uneducated position. Suppose "uneducated" and "contrarian" opinion are two independent random (e.g. normal) variables with the same mean representing the truth (but maybe higher variance for "uneducated"); and suppose what you call "meta-contrarian" opinion is just the truth. Then if you start from "contrarian" it's more likely that "meta-contrarian" opinion will be in the direction of "uneducated" than in the opposite direction, simply because "uneducated" contains nonzero information about where the truth is. I think you can also see this as a kind of regression to the mean.
Belatedly, a quotation to hang at the top of the post:
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still to believe that the moon affects the plants reveals stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again is a sign of philosophy and reflection.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 1775
Whenever holding a position makes you feel superior and is fun to talk about, that's a good sign that the position is not just practical, but signaling related.
Readers be warned: Internalizing this insight may result in catastrophic loss of interest in politics.
Perhaps for some people -- but on the other hand, it creates an even higher intellectual challenge to achieve accurate understanding. Understanding hard and complicated things in math and science is extremely challenging, but ultimately, you still have fully reliable trusted authorities to turn to when you're lost, and you know they won't lie and bullshit you. In politics and heavily politicized fields in general, there is no such safety net; you are completely on your own.
Yet another thought-provoking post from Yvain.
I've implicitly noticed the meta-contrarian trend on Less Wrong and to a lesser extent in SIAI before, and I think it's led me to taking my meta-meta-contrarianism a little far sometimes. I get a little too much enjoyment out of trolling cryonicists and libertarians: indeed, I get a feeling of self-righteousness because it seems that I'm doing a public service by pointing out what appears to be a systematic bias and flaw of group epistemology in the Less Wrong belief cluster. This feeling is completely disproportionate to the extent that I'm actually helping: in general, the best way to emphasize the weaker points of an appealing argument isn't to directly troll the person who holds it. Steve Rayhawk is significantly better than me in this regard. So thanks, Yvain, for pointing out these different levels of meta and how the sense of superiority they give can lead to bad epistemic practice. I'll definitely check for signs of this next time I'm feeling epistemically self-righteous.
A while back the "Steveosphere" had a list of items for which "the masses display more common sense than the smarties do". These suggest that they think they have located Yvain-clusters of the following type:
Here's my alternative explanation for your triads which, while obviously a caricature, is no more so than yours and I think is more accurate: un-educated / academic / educated non-academic.
Essentially your 'contrarian' positions are the mainstream positions you are more or less required to hold to build a successful academic (or media) career. Some academics can get away with deviation in some areas (at some cost to their career prospects) but relatively few are willing to risk it. Intelligent, educated individuals who have not been subject to excessive exposure to academic groupthink are more likely to take your meta-contrarian positions.
See also Moldbug's thoughts on the University.
conservative / liberal / libertarian
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 was thinking more in terms of conservative values like "My country is the best" and "Our enemies are bad people who hate our freedom", but your way makes a lot of sense too.
Although it's worth noting that all of what you say is obvious even to little kids are things no one had even thought of a hundred years ago. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring are remembered as iconic because they kick-started an environmentalist movement that just didn't really exist before the second half of the 20th century (although Thoureau and people like that get honorable mention). The idea of rich people paying to give poor sick people free medicine would have gotten you laughed out of most socially stratified civilizations on the wrong side of about 1850.
But I don't want to get too bogged down in which side is more contrarian, because it sounds too close to arguing whether liberalism or conservativism is better, which of course would be a terribly low status thing to do on a site like this :)
I think it was probably a mistake to include such large-scale politics on there at all. Whether a political position seems natural or contrarian depends on what social context someone's in, wha...
I think you're right about the chronological sequence of kids as "naive liberals" to adults as conservative (more so than the kids, anyway), but not about the rationale. Positioning oneself on the contrarian hierarchy is about showing off that your intellect is greater than the people below you on it. It's the rare adult who feels a need to explicitly demonstrate their intellectual superiority to children--but the common adult who has a job and pays taxes and actually ever thinks about the cost of things, as opposed to the kids, who don't need to.
In short, adults don't oppose free medicine etc. to be contrary to the position of naive children; they oppose it because they're the ones who'd have to pay for it.
Well, the example was to show that there are certain meta-contrarian views held by a big part of this community which are trivially wrong and proof that they have gone too far. Given that restriction, what less controversial example would you have preferred?
I really would have liked to use the racism example, because it's most elegant. The in-group bias means people will naturally like their own race more than others. Some very intelligent and moral people come up with the opposing position that all races are equal; overcoming one's biases enough to believe this becomes (rightly) correlated with high intelligence and morality. This contrarian idea spreads until practically everyone believes it and signals it so much as to become annoying and inane. This creates a niche for certain people to signal their difference to the majority by becoming pro-racial differences. But taken too far, this meta-contrarian position could easily lead to racism.
But any post that includes a whole paragraph on racism automatically ends up with the comments entirely devoted to discussing racism, and the rest of the post completely ignored. Feminism would also have worked, but I would have to be dumb as a rock to voluntarily bring up gender issues on this blog. Global warming seemed like something that Less Wrong is generally willing to admit is correct and doesn't care that much about, while still having enough of an anti-global-warming faction to work as an example.
I think it's worth noting explicitly (though you certainly noted it implicitly) that meta-contrarianism does not simply agree with the original, non-contrarian opinion. Meta-contrarianism usually goes to great lengths to signal that it is indeed the level above, and absolutely not the level below, the default position.
An example, from a guy who lives in a local hipster capital:
People not interested in (or just unskilled at) looking cool will mostly buy their clothing at places like Wal-Mart. The "contrarian" cluster differentiates itself by shopping at very expensive, high-status stores (dropping $150 on a pair of jeans, say). Your hipster crowd does not respond to this by returning to Wal-Mart. Instead, they get very distinct retro or otherwise unusual clothing from thrift stores and the like, places that no one who simply, actually didn't care about signaling would never bother to seek out.
The counter-counter culture often cares just as much about differentiating itself from the culture as it does the counter-culture. The noveau-riche may not have to worry about this, if in their case it comes automatically, but other groups do.
Could it be that the entire history of philosophy and its "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" recurring structure is an instance of this? Not to mention other liberal arts, and the development of the cycles of fashion.
According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 145^2
I can't possibly have been the only one to have been amused by this.
(Well, doesn't Clippy claim to be a superintelligence?)
According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 145
I can't possibly have been the only one to have been amused by this.
The really disturbing possibility is that average people hanging out here might actually be of the sort that solves IQ tests extremely successfully, with scores over 140, but whose real-life accomplishments are far below what these scores might suggest. In other words, that there might be a selection effect for the sort of people that Scott Adams encountered when he joined Mensa:
...I decided to take an I.Q. test administered by Mensa, the organization of geniuses. If you score in the top 2% of people who take that same test, you get to call yourself a “genius” and optionally join the group. I squeaked in and immediately joined so I could hang out with the other geniuses and do genius things. I even volunteered to host some meetings at my apartment.
Then, the horror.
It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was
I should clarify that I was specifically referring to the interesting placement of that superscript 2. :-)
EDIT: Though actually, this is probably the perfect opportunity to wonder if the reason people join this community is that it's probably the easiest high-IQ group to join in the world: you don't have to pass a test or earn a degree; all you have to do is write intelligent blog comments.
Oh, then it was a misunderstanding. I thought you were (like me) amused by the poll result suggesting that the intelligence of the average person here is in the upper 99.865-th percentile.
(Just to get the feel for that number, belonging to the same percentile of income distribution in the U.S. would mean roughly a million dollars a year.)
There is clearly a demand for organizations which provide opportunities to interact and socialize with people carefully selected for their ability to solve clever puzzles (and whatever else is on the IQ test--I haven't taken a real one)
That's not the sense of IQ that I mean; rather, I mean the underlying thing which that ability is supposed to be an indicator of.
(My guess would be that this underlying thing is probably something like "richness of mental life".)
Does anybody here specifically seek out high-IQ friends? Do you feel like trying to explain the appeal to me?
My experience suggests that it makes a significant difference to one's quality of life whether the people in one's social circle are close to one's own intelligence level.
Not too long ago I spent some time at the SIAI house; and even though I was probably doing more "work" than usual while I was there, it felt like vacation, simply because the everyday task of communicating with people was so much easier and more efficient than in my normal life.
Here I go, speaking for other people, but I'm guessing that people at the LessWrong meetup at least met some baseline of all those other qualities, by komponisto's estimation, and that the difference of intelligence allowed for such a massive increase in ability to communicate made talking so much more enjoyable, given that ey was talking to decent people.
Each quality may not be linear. If someone is "half as nice" as another person, I don't want to talk to them at half the frequency, or bet that I'll fully enjoy conversation half of the time. A certain threshold of most qualities makes a person totally not worth talking to. But at the same time, a person can only be so much more thoughtful, respectful, funny, supportive, before you lose your ability to identify with them again! That's my experience anyhow - if I admire a person too much, I have difficulty imagining that they identify with me as I do with them. Trust needs some symmetry. And so there are probably optimal levels of friendship-worthy qualities (very roughly by any measure), a minimum threshold, and a region where a little difference makes a big difference. The left-bounded S-curves of friendship.
Then there ...
There is clearly a demand for organizations which provide opportunities to interact and socialize with people carefully selected for their ability to solve clever puzzles (and whatever else is on the IQ test--I haven't taken a real one).
Really? I don't think that's true; I think people just tend to assume that IQ is a good proxy for general intellectualism (e.g. highbrow tastes, willingness to talk and debate a lot, being well-read.) Since it's easier to score an IQ test than a test judging political literacy, education, and favorite novels, that's what organizations like Mensa use, and that's the measuring stick everyone trots out. Needless to say, it's not a very good one, but it's made its way into the culture.
I mean, even in casual usage, when most people talk about someone's high IQ, they probably aren't talking about focus, memory, or pattern recognition. They're likely actually talking about education and interests.
I'd say that the problem is the selection effect for intelligent underachievers. People who are in the top 2% of the population by some widely recognized measure of intellectual accomplishment presumably already have affiliations, titles, and positions far more prestigious than the membership in an organization where the only qualification is passing a written test could ever be. Also, their everyday social circles are likely to consist of other individuals of the same caliber, so they have no need to seek them out actively.
Therefore, in an organization like Mensa, I would expect a strong selection effect for people who have the ability to achieve high IQ scores (whatever that might specifically imply, considering the controversies in IQ research), but who lack other abilities necessary to translate that into actual accomplishment and acquire recognition and connections among high-achieving people. Needless to say, such people are unlikely to end up as high-status individuals in our culture (or any other, for that matter). People of the sort you mention, smart enough to have flashes of extraordinary insight but unable to stay focused long enough to get anything done, likely account for some non-trivial subset of those.
That said, in such a decentralized organization, I would expect that the quality of local chapters and the sort of people they attract depends greatly on the ability and attitudes of the local leadership. There are probably places both significantly better and worse than what you describe.
herbal-spiritual-alternative medicine / conventional medicine / Robin Hanson
Can you link to a Robin Hanson article on this topic so that people who aren't already familiar with his opinions on this subject (read: LW newbies like me) know what this is about?
Or alternately, I propose this sequence:
regular medical care by default / alt-med / regular medical care because alt-med is unscientific
regular medical care by default / alt-med / regular medical care because alt-med is unscientific
This is more in line with the other examples. I second the request for an edit. Yvain, you could add "Robin Hanson" to the fourth slot: it would kinda mess up your triplets, but with the justification that it'd be a funny example of just how awesomely contrarian Robin Hanson is. :D
Also, Yvain, you happen to list what people here would deem more-or-less correct contrarian clusters in your triplet examples. But I have no idea how often the meta-level contrarian position is actually correct, and I fear that I might get too much of a kick out of the positions you list in your triplets simply because my position is more meta and I associate metaness with truth when in reality it might be negatively correlated. Perhaps you could think of a few more-wrong meta-contrarian positions to balance what may be a small affective bias?
My comment was largely tongue in cheek, but:
- KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically proven genetic differences"
If I failed to notice that there are scientifically proven genetic differences I would be missing a far more important part of reality (evolutionary psychology and the huge effects of evolution in the last 20,000 years) than if I failed to notice that being a bigot was bad and impeded moral progress. That said, if most people took this position, it'd result in a horrible tragedy of the commons situation, which is why most social scientists cooperate on the 'let's not promote racism' dilemma. I'm not a social scientist so I get to defect and study some of the more interesting aspects of human evolutionary biology.
Awareness of genetic differences between races constitutes negative knowledge in many cases, that is it leads to anticipations that match the outcomes more badly than they would have otherwise. If everyone suspects that genetically blue-haired people are slightly less intelligent on average for genetic reasons, you want to hire the most intelligent person for a job and after a very long selection process (th...
Okay, anyone who cares about helping people in Africa and can multiply should be giving their money to x-risk charities. Because saving the world also includes saving Africa.
But... but... but saving the world doesn't signal the same affiliations as saving Africa!
Sorry, I didn't mean to assume the conclusion. Rather than do a disservice to the arguments with a hastily written reply, I'm going to cop out of the responsibility of providing a rigorous technical analysis and just share some thoughts. From what I've seen of your posts, your arguments were that the current nominally x-risk-reducing organizations (primarily FHI and SIAI) aren't up to snuff when it comes to actually saving the world (in the case of SIAI perhaps even being actively harmful). Despite and because of being involved with SIAI I share some of your misgivings. That said, I personally think that SIAI is net-beneficial for their cause of promoting clear and accurate thinking about the Singularity, and that the PR issues you cite regarding Eliezer will be negligible in 5-10 years when more academics start speaking out publically about Singularity issues, which will only happen if SIAI stays around, gets funding, keeps on writing papers, and promotes the pretty-successful Singularity Summits. Also, I never saw you mention that SIAI is actively working on the research problems of building a Friendly artificial intelligence. Indeed, in a few years, SIAI will have begun the ende...
/startrant
They seem to be funded by promoting the idea that DOOM is SOON - and that to avert it we should all be sending our hard-earned dollars to their intrepid band of Friendly Folk.
Or, more realistically, the idea that DOOM has a CHANCE of happening any time between NOW and ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW but that small CHANCE has a large enough impact in EXPECTED UTILITY that we should really figure out more about the problem because someone, not necessarily SIAI might have to deal with the problem EVENTUALLY.
One might naively expect such an organization would typically act so as to exaggerate the risks -- but SIAI doesn't seem to be doing that so one's naive expectations would be wrong. It's amazing how people associate an aura of overconfidence coming from the philosophical positions of Eliezer with the actual confidence levels of the thinkers of SIAI. Seriously, where are these crazy claims about DOOM being SOON and that ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY is the MESSIAH? From something Eliezer wrote 10 years ago? The Singularity Institute is pretty damn reasonable. The journal and conference papers they write are pretty well grounded in sound and careful reasoning. But ha, who would read tho...
FWIW, I don't see what I am saying as particularly "contrarian". A lot of people would be pretty sceptical about the end of the world being nigh - or the idea that a bug might take over the world - or the idea that a bunch of saintly programmers will be the ones to save us all. Maybe contrary to the ideas of the true believers - if that is what you mean.
Right, I said metacontrarian. Although most LW people seem SIAI-agnostic, a lot of the most vocal and most experienced posters are pro-SIAI or SIAI-related, so LW comes across as having a generally pro-SIAI attitude, which is a traditionally contrarian attitude. Thus going against the contrarian status quo is metacontrarian.
You encourage me to speculate about the motives of the individuals involved. While that might be fun, it doesn't seem to matter much - the SIAI itself is evidently behaving as though it wants dollars, attention, and manpower - to help it meet its aims.
I'm confused. Anyone trying to accomplish anything is going to try to get dollars, attention, and manpower. I'm confused as to how this is relevant to the merit of SIAI's purpose. SIAI's never claimed to be fundamentally opposed to having resources....
Everyone is incredibly critical of Eliezer, probably much more so than he deserves, because everyone is racing to be first to establish their non-cult-victim status.
I don't know about anybody else, but I am somewhat disturbed by Eliezer's persistent use of hyphens in place of em dashes, and am very concerned that it could be hurting SIAI's image.
And I say the same about his use of double spacing. It's an outdated and unprofessional practice. In fact, Anna Salamon and Louie Helm are 2 other SIAI folk that engage in this abysmal writing style, and for that reason I've often been tempted to write them off entirely. They're obviously not cognizant of the writing style of modern academic thinkers. The implications are obvious.
Noticing a social cluster takes social savvy and intelligence.
Therefore, showing that you can see a social cluster makes you look good.
Maybe going up a level in one of Yvain's hierarchies is showing off that you've discovered a social cluster? It goes together with distancing yourself from that cluster, but I don't know why.
I would like to announce that I have discovered the social cluster that has discovered the method of discovering all social clusters, and am now a postmodernist. Seriously guys, postmodernism is pretty meta. Update on expected metaness.
None, really. I just like how its proponents can always win arguments by claiming to be more meta than their opponents. ("Sure, everything you made sense within your frame of reference, but there are no privileged frames of reference. Indeed, proving that there are privileged frames of reference requires a privileged frame of reference and is thus an impossible philosophical act. I can't prove anything I just said, which proves my point, depending on whether you think it did or not.")
(I don't take postmodernism seriously, but some of the ideas are philosophically elegant.)
I can't prove anything I just said, which proves my point, depending on whether you think it did or not.
I would like this on a t-shirt.
I have to admit, this has definitely been a hazard for me. As I said to simplicio a few months ago, I've had a sort of tendency to be "too clever" by taking the "clever contrarian" position. This gets to the point where I'm fascinated by those who can write up defenses of ridiculous positions and significantly increase my exposure to them.
I think part of what made me stray from "the path" was a tendency to root for the rhetorical "underdog" and be intrigued -- excessively -- with brilliant arguments that could defend ridiculous positions
I have to wonder if I'm falling into the same trap with my "Most scientists only complain about how hard it is to explain their field because their understanding is so poor to begin with." (i.e., below Level 2, the level at which you can trace out the implications between your field and numerous others in both directions, possibly knowing how to trace back the basis of all specialized knowledge to arbitrary levels)
Very much related to The Correct Contrarian Cluster.
Also, we had a post specifically on countersignaling: Things You Can't Countersignal.
One more cluster I can think of is attitude to copyright law. Something like:
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,
At least, that's my experience; take it with a grain of bias in favor of position four.
Not everything is signaling.
The intellectually compulsive are natural critics. You see something wrong in an argument, and you argue against it. The natural stopping point in this process is when you don't find significant problems with the theory, and that is more likely for a fringe theory that other's don't bother to critique. When no one is helping you find the flaws, it's less likely you'll find them. You'll win arguments, at least by your evaluation, because you are familiar with their arguments and can show flaws, but your argument is unfamiliar to ...
This suggests that a common tactic (deliberate or otherwise) would be to represent your opponents as being the level below you, rather than the level above. For example this article, which treats Singularitarians as at level 1, rather than level 3, on
technology is great! -> but it has costs, like to the enviroment, and making social control easier -> Actually, the benefits vastly outweigh those.
Ironically, it's not that far off for SIAI, which is at level 4, 'certain technologies are existentially dangerous'
This seems to hold true for all the triads ...
The pleasure I get out of trolling atheists definitely has a meta-contrarian component to it. When I was a teenager I would troll Christians but I've long since stopped finding that even slightly challenging or fun.
As a mathematician, I offer my services for anybody who wants arguments (mathematical arguments, not philosophical ones) that 1+1 = 3. But beware: as a meta-contrarian mathematician, I will also explain why these arguments, though valid in their own way, are silly.
I have a strong urge to signal my difference to the Lesswrong crowd. Should I be worried that all my positions may be just meta^2 contrarianism?
people get deep personal satisfaction from arguing the positions even when their arguments are unlikely to change policy
I very much wish that intellectual debate was more effectiveness-oriented in general. I myself try to refrain from arguing about things that don't actually matter or that I can't hope to change (not always successfully).
I have a style question. Are there less grating ways to write gender neutral texts?
I, to my great surprise, was irritated to no end by "ey" and "eir". I always stumbled when reading it. I dislike it and think "he/she" or "they" may be more natural and cause less stumbling when reading the article.
So far, I am against all the invented gender-neutral pronouns. Most of them sound strange ("ey" and "eir" look like a typo or phonetic imitation of deep southern accent, "xe" and "xir" use "x" sound and are simply painful to pronounce)
As of now, I am willing to sacrifice gender neutrality in texts in favor of readability.
That suggests people around that level of intelligence have reached the point where they no longer feel it necessary to differentiate themselves from the sort of people who aren't smart enough to understand that there might be side benefits to death.
This is an interesting hypothesis, but applying it to LessWrong requires that the LW community has a consensus on how people rank by intelligence, that that consensus be correct, and that people believe it is correct. My impression is that everybody thinks they're the smartest person in the room, and judges ...
Ebola has offered a recent nice example of the triad. Mainstream: "be afraid, be very afraid"; contrarian: "don't be so gullible, why, hardly any more people have died from Ebola than have died from flu/traffic accidents/smoking/etc"; meta-contrarian: "what is to be feared is a super-lethal disease escaping containment & killing many more millions than the normal flu or traffic death toll".
BTW, I'm not actually that intelligent (IQ about 92 or 96 if I remember right) but pretending to adopt a meta-contrarian position might be a useful social tactic for me. Any advice from those who know the area on how to use it?
Advocate for the obvious position using the language and catchphrases of its opponents. I remember once saying, "Well, have we ever tried blindly throwing lots of money at the educational system?" Everyone agreed that this was a wise and sophisticated thing to say, even though I was by far the least knowledgeable person in the room on the subject and was just advocating the default strategy for improving public schools. Other examples:
"Greed is good."
"The chief virtue of a $professional is $vice."
"I'm a tax-and-spend liberal, and I think there should be much more government regulation. For example, the sad truth is that the realities of medical care require the existence of death panels, and I'd rather have them run by government bureaucrats than corporate accountants."
I wonder if this means we should place more weight on opinions that don't easily compress onto this contrarianism axis, since they're less likely to be rooted in signalling/group affiliations, and more likely to have a non-trivial amount of thought put into them.
I think about the counter-signaling game a bit differently. Consider some question that has a binary answer - e.g. a yes/no question?. Natural prejudices or upbringing might cause most people to say pick, say, yes. Then someone thinks about the question and for reason r1 switches to no. Someone else who agrees with r1 then comes up with reason r2, and switches back to yes. Then r3 causes a switch back to no, ad infinitum.
Even though the conclusion at each point in the hierarchy is indistinguishable from a conclusion somewhere else in the hierarchy, th...
6) Worth a footnote: I think in a lot of issues, the original uneducated position has disappeared, or been relegated to a few rednecks in some remote corner of the world, and so meta-contrarians simply look like contrarians. I think it's important to keep the terminology, because most contrarians retain a psychology of feeling like they are being contrarian, even after they are the new norm. But my only evidence for this is introspection, so it might be false.
Deserves MORE than a footnote.
conservative / liberal / libertarian
Liberal and libertarian don't mean the same thing in Europe as in America; keep that in mind when writing for international audiences. (Very roughly speaking, an European liberal is a moderate version of an American libertarian, and an American liberal is a moderate version of an European libertarian.)
Thus Eliezer's title for this mentality, "Pretending To Be Wise".
Have we broadened that term to refer to... well, lowercase pretending-to-be-wise in general? In the original post, he used it specifically to refer to those who try to signal wisdom by neutrality. (Though I did notice he used it in the broader sense in HPMoR. Is it thus officially redefined?)
Death universally seems bad to pretty much everyone on first analysis, and what it seems, it is.
How can you know? Have you ever tried living a thousand years? Has anybody? If you had a choice between death and infinite life, where inifinite does mean infinite, so that your one-billion year birthday is only the sweet begining of it, would you find this an easy choice to make? I think that's big part of the point of people who argue that no - death is not necessarily a bad thing.
To be clear, and because this is not about signalling: I'm not saying I would immediately choose death. I'm just saying: it would be an extraordinarily difficult choice to make.
Funnily enough, triads became a meme format I've seen around recently (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit)
This triad was missed:
"Muslims are terrorists!" / "Islam is a religion of peace." / "Religion is problematic in general but Islam is the worst and I can back that claim up with statistics I read on Sam Harris' blog."
It's always a bit of a shock when you're the contrarian and you discover someone meta-contrarianizing you on the outside lane. For example, here's an interesting triad I just recently became aware of:
Base: monogamy is assumed without discussion, cheating is the end of a relationship unless maybe if you confess and swear to never do it again.
Contrarian: open/poly relationship is agreed upon after discussion, it's not cheating if there's no lying.
Meta-con: non-exclusivity is assumed, no discussion. Cheating is whatever, just don't tell me about it.
I held the...
There is a neat paper on this by Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To called "Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling."
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 doe...
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...give us a bit of pause.
Actually, that move is perfectly consistent with real skepticism applied to a complex assertion.
To see why, let's consider a different argument. Suppose a True Believer says we should punish gays or disallow gay marriage "because God hates homosexuality". You and I are skeptical that this assertion is rationally defensible so we attack it at what seems like the obvious first link in the logical chain. We say "I doubt that god exists. Prove to me that god exists, and then maybe we'll consider your argument." At this point you can divide the positions into:
"god hates X"/god doesn't exist
Now let us suppose TB actually does it. He does prove that god exists. Does this mean that we skeptics immediately have to accept his entire chain of reasoning? Of course not! We jump to the next weak link. To establish the original claim, one would need to prove god exists and is benevolent and wrote the bible and meant t...
Mercy:
Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
However, it seems to me that such mainstream does exist. Compared to the overall range of ideas that have been held throughout the history of humanity, and even the overall range of ideas that I believe people could hold without being crazy or monstrous, the range acceptable in today's mainstream discourse looks awfully narrow to me. It also seems to me very narrow by historical standards -- for example, when I look at the 19th century books I've read, I see an immensely greater diversity of ideas than one can see from the modern authors that occupy a comparable mainstream range. (This of course doesn't apply to hard sciences, in which the accumulation of knowledge has a monotonous upward trend.)
Of course, like every human society, ours is also shaken by passionate controversies. However, most of those that I observe in practice are between currents that are overall very similar from a broader perspective.
Here's a good one:
Inflation is good because give everyone money / inflation is bad, deflation is good / small inflation may be necessary to offset human loss aversion
A triad I just thought of today which seems definitely true:
Doesn't care to make small mistakes that might make him/her look somewhat silly / Cares to avoid every level of mistake to acquire the cleanest reputation possible / Doesn't care to make small mistakes that might make him/her look somewhat silly.
A follow-up thought: This pattern seems to also work for life decisions, and not only for positions in debates or fashion choices. For example: A few years ago, I almost didn't take the offer to do a PhD at an Ivy League school, as opposed to a less highly ranked school, and to live in a mainstream popular city, as opposed to the middle of nowhere, because of my contrarianism. And then my meta-contrarianism kicked in, and I took the offer. I'm happy with the choice, but I do every once in a while have to remind myself of the fact that I consciously decided...
I think the whole thing about dwelling on the negatives of our society, is because there's a deeper level to the concerns. Like a sort of collective lacking of something, lacking in Romantic relations to nature and society and such things, but without knowing where such things can be found. Just basic yearning that shows up in the extremes of our modern society, which manifests in media and overromantized movies about how 'spiritually connected' Indians were, or the peace of Buddhists, or the good old ways; you know what I mean. The movie Avatar is basical...
This is exactly how history is studied.
Historiography is how historical opinions have changed over time. It first begins with the Orthodox viewpoint, which is the first, generally accepted viewpoint of the events that arises. It is generally very biased because it comes about directly after the event has occurred, when feelings still run strong.
This Orthodox viewpoint is contrasted by several Revisionist viewpoints, which tend to make wildly different conclusions based upon new evidence in order to sell books (historical scandals are quite good for that)...
I know this is an old post, but I wanted to ask a couple questions.
Can you clarify if this meta-contrarian hypothesis of human psychology makes predictions that distinguish it from other explanations for holding an idea to be true or communicating it to be true? I ask since from reading some of the comments, the classification of these triads seems like a fluid thing, and I can't think of anything offhand that might be used to constrain them. If you want to use your hypothesis merely to talk about the reasons for why confidence is assigned, do you think ...
Great post. I've had a similar idea for a while but didn't realize just how far it could be generalized.
I especially noticed this idea while reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, which seems to posit the hierarchy as being something like "Belief in Christianity because of social pressures / Disbelief in Christianity because who needs social pressures / Belief in Christianity because of comprehension of its 'true meaning' (or something)".
I guess when there are potentially a lot of layers of meta-contrarianism like in Matt_Simpson's example, t...
Great article. However, why do you call them "meta-contrarian", instead of "anti-contrarian"? I would not call something "meta-" unless it adds additional dimensions to the given context. For example, "meta-theory" is not about disputing particular theories but something totally different.
I advocate majoritarianism on most topics related to science.
Including nutrition.
I'll take Gary Taubes seriously when the NIH does.
I'm new here and I have a question. If an overly intelligent person holds/displays meta-contrarian views in a group without deliberately trying to announce are they still signalling?
Also isn't First World/Third World an outdated classification?
IMHO a good way to spot Meta-Contrarianism is when proponents of Popperian/Deutsch epistemology don't recognize that 'no final say' also applies to their own - even epistemic - beliefs.
At the university I have met 2 types of professors. The first type will explain the new topic in very academic and strictly professional way. The second type will explain the topic in a plain language, in a very easy-to-understand way. If I look at it from the perspective of countersignaling, I would describe the first type as contrarian and the second type as meta-contrarian. My observation is also that the contrarian would be usually younger professor in his late thirties or forties, and meta-contrarian would be professor in his sixties and up.
The third "related to" link is a bit broken: points to a Google redirect instead of the article itself.
What about the following triad?
life's good / nihilistic approach to life / I want to become a god on earth.
A person who is very intelligent will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir intelligence, by deliberately not holding difficult-to-understand opinions.
What does it mean when people hold difficult to understand moral opinions?
But as has been pointed out, along with the gigantic cost, death does have a few small benefits. It lowers overpopulation, it allows the new generation to develop free from interference by their elders, it provides motivation to get things done quickly.
Right - and let's not forget that it takes out of circulation a load of persistent parasites which have evolved over hundreds of generations to exploit your genome, which might otherwise find and attack your relatives and descendants.
This post inspired me to write an article on Feminism, criticism of feminism, and contrarianism over at FeministCritics.org.
Nancy, I'm a bit confused by your comment.
From my point of view, the PUA believers have the advantage at LW
What does "PUA believer" mean? Out of the folks who discuss pickup positively on LessWrong, I doubt any of them "believe" in it uncritically. However, they may feel motivated to defend pickup from inaccurate characterizations.
I do not see people who want to discuss pickup in a not-completely-negative way on LW as having an obvious advantage. The debate is not symmetrical. Anyone who can be painted as a defender of pickup is vulnerable to all sorts of stigma. Yet the worst they can say in their defense is to call the attackers close-minded or uneducated about pickup.
and being gently told, no it's wonderful, and the non-wonderful bits (the worst of which I'd never heard of until you brought them up, something I'm never sure you quite believed) don't matter when so much of it is different
Yes, different parts of pickup are different. No, the good parts don't necessarily justify the bad parts, but the presence of good parts means that pickup shouldn't be unequivocally dismissed.
...being in the brainfog business is best for everyone even though there's no
How can we reduce this polarization?
Maybe by moderates coming out of the closet, so to speak?
Hi, my name is Daenerys, and I have ambiguous views about PUA. My initial reaction was "Ew! Bad!" but after reading the debates here, talking with a friend, and learning more elsewhere, my views towards it have softened. I still do not think that all of it is 100% ok though. It is a complicated issue with many facets.
Mainly I wish it wouldn't hijack non-PUA discussions. I am seriously close to just starting a PUA discussion to keep all this stuff in one place, but I guess I feel if anyone should do it, it should be the mods.
PUA Moderates of the World, Unite!
To be contrarian, I think you're only portraying a subset of possible outcomes. We might say the following fits:
Kantian Deontological Ethics (all men are oblidged to) > Positivist Ethics (ethics don't exist as anything more than preference) > Modern Liberal Ethics (ethics exist as preference but preferences are important survival tools that can lead us to objective ethics),
But the truth is I don't see a necessary triad in any of this because there is no original position. In my example, we would find that Kantian Dialectical Ethics consumed prior t...
The bigger issue to me is the value system that makes this phenomenon exist in the first place. It essentially requires people to care more about signaling than seeking truth. Of course this makes sense for many (perhaps most) people since signaling can get you all sorts of other things you want, whereas finding the truth could happen in a vacuum/near vacuum (you could find out some fundamental truth and then die immediately, forget about it, tell it to people and have no one believe you, etc.)
It bothers me that extremely narrow self-interest (as indicated...
from my limited understanding a hipster is a person who deliberately uses unpopular, obsolete, or obscure styles and preferences in an attempt to be "cooler" than the mainstream.
Not to argue over definitions, but your use of "hipster" seems overly-narrow. As I understand it, it refers to those who deliberately appropriate styles used by old / other subcultures with concern for aesthetics rather than signaling (or, if you prefer, complex signaling rather than mere group-membership). Obviously some of those folks are doing it to try ...
The contrarian treadmill for medicine is more like "conventional / alternative / conventional again / Robin Hanson"
You can't evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!
Agree to some extent but not fully. In particular, I think that the fact the well documented phenomenon of illusory superiority gives rational grounds for skepticism when somebody claims that his or her abilities are greater than he or she able to effectively signal. In situations where there's great disparity between claimed ability and signaled ability, very high levels of skepticism are warranted.
One that really irks me is compound noun with a pronoun usage:
Always "Me and X" / Always "X and I" / "X and I" for an subject and "X and me" for an object
The second one is being smart enough to know that "Me and X went to the store" is improper because you're using "Me" in a subject, but not smart enough to know how to fix it, and instead just replacing "Me and X" with "X and I" one for one in every sentence.
What makes my blood run hot (and gives me that "like to argue it" high, I think) is that the middle section are trying to signal they're "...
Stupid question for the guys here, but how long is optimal to counter-signal to a woman. i.e., how long do you pretend not to be interested in her, whether she is interested in you or not. Based on my non-trivial romantic experience, I have two theories.
1. Wait until she makes unusually-long eye contact with you. It should be pretty noticable, like ~5 seconds or longer, such that it would otherwise be unusual. Use Bayes theorem. THEN WAIT ANOTHER WEEK to stop countersignalling.
2. Three weeks. IDK it just seems to work that way.
3. You do not stop counter-si...
I can think of clear examples where a particular ideological foundation allows for death to be good, without requiring a contrarian or meta-contrarian position. One thought along such lines is whether religion would fall into the contrarian, or meta-contrarian view.
If you ask most 5 year olds, they believe in the metaphysical.
So could a triad be religious/atheist/religious? Or is there an extra level, where the first kind of atheist is the fedora tipping teenager on reddit, then there be a meta-meta atheist, or would perhaps the meta-meta position be agnostic?
Is religion too complex for such an simplification?
Great post, obviously.
You argue that signaling often leads to distribution of intellectual positions following this pattern: in favor of X with simple arguments / in favor of Y with complex arguments / in favor of something like X with simple arguments
I think it’s worth noting that the pattern of position often looks different. For example, there is: in favor of X with simple arguments / in favor of Y with complex arguments / in favor of something like X with surprising and even more sophisticated and hard-to-understand arguments
In fact, I think many of yo...
The Patri Friedman links are dead, and blocked from archive.org. Anyone have access to another archive, so I can see what he's talking about? There has got to be a better way to link. Has no one come up with a distributed archive of linked material yet?
To be contrarian, I think you're only portraying a subset of possible outcomes. We might say the following fits:
Kantian Deontological Ethics (all men are oblidged to) > Positivist Ethics (ethics don't exist as anything more than preference) > Modern Liberal Ethics (ethics exist as preference but preferences are important survival tools that can lead us to objective ethics),
But the truth is I don't see a necessary triad in any of this because there is no original position. In my example, we would find that Kantian Dialectical Ethics consumed prior t...
To be contrarian, I think you're only portraying a subset of possible outcomes. We might say the following fits:
Kantian Deontological Ethics (all men are oblidged to) > Positivist Ethics (ethics don't exist as anything more than preference) > Modern Liberal Ethics (ethics exist as preference but preferences are important survival tools that can lead us to objective ethics),
But the truth is I don't see a necessary triad in any of this because there is no original position. In my example, we would find that Kantian Dialectical Ethics consumed prior t...
To be contrarian, I think you're only portraying a subset of possible outcomes. We might say the following fits:
Kantian Deontological Ethics (all men are oblidged to) > Positivist Ethics (ethics don't exist as anything more than preference) > Modern Liberal Ethics (ethics exist as preference but preferences are important survival tools that can lead us to objective ethics),
But the truth is I don't see a necessary triad in any of this because there is no original position. In my example, we would find that Kantian Dialectical Ethics consumed prior t...
libertarians are always more hostile toward liberals, even though they have just about as many points of real disagreement with the conservatives.
I think it's because libertarians care a lot more about the points on which they disagree with the liberals. Issues like gay marriage and abortion don't seem to matter as much as economic rights.
I don't think this is the case for most libertarians, especially the younger, internet based, ron paul oriented kind of libertarians - many of them are primarily motivated by the social issues.... and yet they still seem to prefer arguing with liberals rather than conservatives. I think it has more to do with the fact that they view liberals as smart people who believe stupid things, while they view conservatives as just stupid troglodytes not worth wasting time on.
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 doe...
atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer = very large self selected group
college professor = very small highly filtered group
I believe this exemplifies a major weakness of this article and I'd actually like to hear a better analogy since I'm somewhat skeptical about a populist take down of a poorly defined subculture; one which I presume varies greatly from the authors' tribe(s). More vexing, but also harder to describe, is it's vaguely moralistic tone, but perhaps that's just the absence of evidence talking.
(Would like to be shown t...
Word!
I went through a few of these on my way though idea-space and then it took a while to recognize the systematic.
I wonder if conspiracy theories could be a "middle-band" position? Any fool can see the WTC was destroyed by a plane...
1. The average IQ of visitors to this site is 145 squared? Impressive!
2. Are you trying to be subtly meta-contrarian with your idiosyncratic orthography, or are you just really glad to see me?
|so no one tries to signal intelligence by saying that 1+1 equals 3
oh, you are so asking for it, no matter how old this topic is...
There IS a sense in which 1+1=3. It is not particularly deep, or philosiphical, or even particulalry useful mathematically, except possibly to demonstrate a simple result of playing around with unusual axioms.
See, when one man and one woman....
snickers
I think about the counter-signaling game a bit differently. Consider some question that has a binary answer - e.g. a yes/no question?. Natural prejudices or upbringing might cause most people to say pick, say, yes. Then someone thinks about the question and for reason r1 switches to no. Someone else who agrees with r1 then comes up with reason r2, and switches back to yes. Then r3 causes a switch back to no, ad infinitum.
Even though the conclusion at each point in the hierarchy is indistinguishable from a conclusion somewhere else in the hierarchy, the reason someone holds their conclusion still separates them from people on other levels with the same conclusion. So the reasoning is the signal.
For example, consider the God question. The hierarchy might go something like this:
Someone on the 8th level of the hierarchy doesn't need to worry about being confused with someone on the 4th level since the 4th level doesn't properly understand occam's razor and couldn't use it as a reason for not believing.
Thinking about intellectual signalling like this, I definitely take pleasure in being higher in the hierarchy - i.e. being a counter-counter-counter-...-counter-signaler. And I also find it disturbing when someone has a reason that I hadn't considered yet. They're farther up than me!
So, where would "Believe because of generalised Pascal's Wager" be on your hierarchy? ;)
Related to: Why Real Men Wear Pink, That Other Kind of Status, Pretending to be Wise, The "Outside The Box" Box
WARNING: Beware of things that are fun to argue -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Science has inexplicably failed to come up with a precise definition of "hipster", but from my limited understanding a hipster is a person who deliberately uses unpopular, obsolete, or obscure styles and preferences in an attempt to be "cooler" than the mainstream. But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?
As previously discussed, in certain situations refusing to signal can be a sign of high status. Thorstein Veblen invented the term "conspicuous consumption" to refer to the showy spending habits of the nouveau riche, who unlike the established money of his day took great pains to signal their wealth by buying fast cars, expensive clothes, and shiny jewelery. Why was such flashiness common among new money but not old? Because the old money was so secure in their position that it never even occurred to them that they might be confused with poor people, whereas new money, with their lack of aristocratic breeding, worried they might be mistaken for poor people if they didn't make it blatantly obvious that they had expensive things.
The old money might have started off not buying flashy things for pragmatic reasons - they didn't need to, so why waste the money? But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the old money actively cultivated an air of superiority to the nouveau riche and their conspicuous consumption; not buying flashy objects becomes a matter of principle. This makes sense: the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche.
This process is called countersignaling, and one can find its telltale patterns in many walks of life. Those who study human romantic attraction warn men not to "come on too strong", and this has similarities to the nouveau riche example. A total loser might come up to a woman without a hint of romance, promise her nothing, and demand sex. A more sophisticated man might buy roses for a woman, write her love poetry, hover on her every wish, et cetera; this signifies that he is not a total loser. But the most desirable men may deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are so high status that they don't need to. The average man tries to differentiate himself from the total loser by being nice; the extremely attractive man tries to differentiate himself from the average man by not being especially nice.
In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the same clothes uncool people wear. Families with old money don't wear much more jewelry than the middle class. And very attractive men approach women with the same lack of subtlety a total loser would use.1
If politics, philosophy, and religion are really about signaling, we should expect to find countersignaling there as well.
Pretending To Be Wise
Let's go back to Less Wrong's long-running discussion on death. Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad. Death is bad because it kills you. There is nothing subtle about it, and there does not need to be. Death universally seems bad to pretty much everyone on first analysis, and what it seems, it is.
But as has been pointed out, along with the gigantic cost, death does have a few small benefits. It lowers overpopulation, it allows the new generation to develop free from interference by their elders, it provides motivation to get things done quickly. Precisely because these benefits are so much smaller than the cost, they are hard to notice. It takes a particularly subtle and clever mind to think them up. Any idiot can tell you why death is bad, but it takes a very particular sort of idiot to believe that death might be good.
So pointing out this contrarian position, that death has some benefits, is potentially a signal of high intelligence. It is not a very reliable signal, because once the first person brings it up everyone can just copy it, but it is a cheap signal. And to the sort of person who might not be clever enough to come up with the benefits of death themselves, and only notices that wise people seem to mention death can have benefits, it might seem super extra wise to say death has lots and lots of great benefits, and is really quite a good thing, and if other people should protest that death is bad, well, that's an opinion a five year old child could come up with, and so clearly that person is no smarter than a five year old child. Thus Eliezer's title for this mentality, "Pretending To Be Wise".
If dwelling on the benefits of a great evil is not your thing, you can also pretend to be wise by dwelling on the costs of a great good. All things considered, modern industrial civilization - with its advanced technology, its high standard of living, and its lack of typhoid fever - is pretty neat. But modern industrial civilization also has many costs: alienation from nature, strains on the traditional family, the anonymity of big city life, pollution and overcrowding. These are real costs, and they are certainly worth taking seriously; nevertheless, the crowds of emigrants trying to get from the Third World to the First, and the lack of any crowd in the opposite direction, suggest the benefits outweigh the costs. But in my estimation - and speak up if you disagree - people spend a lot more time dwelling on the negatives than on the positives, and most people I meet coming back from a Third World country have to talk about how much more authentic their way of life is and how much we could learn from them. This sort of talk sounds Wise, whereas talk about how nice it is to have buses that don't break down every half mile sounds trivial and selfish..
So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side of the argument is wrong.
This only works in issues which are so muddled to begin with that there is no fact of the matter, or where the fact of the matter is difficult to tease out: so no one tries to signal intelligence by saying that 1+1 equals 3 (although it would not surprise me to find a philosopher who says truth is relative and this equation is a legitimate form of discourse).
Meta-Contrarians Are Intellectual Hipsters
A person who is somewhat upper-class will conspicuously signal eir wealth by buying difficult-to-obtain goods. A person who is very upper-class will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir wealth, by deliberately not buying difficult-to-obtain goods.
A person who is somewhat intelligent will conspicuously signal eir intelligence by holding difficult-to-understand opinions. A person who is very intelligent will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir intelligence, by deliberately not holding difficult-to-understand opinions.
According to the survey, the average IQ on this site is around 1452. People on this site differ from the mainstream in that they are more willing to say death is bad, more willing to say that science, capitalism, and the like are good, and less willing to say that there's some deep philosophical sense in which 1+1 = 3. That suggests people around that level of intelligence have reached the point where they no longer feel it necessary to differentiate themselves from the sort of people who aren't smart enough to understand that there might be side benefits to death. Instead, they are at the level where they want to differentiate themselves from the somewhat smarter people who think the side benefits to death are great. They are, basically, meta-contrarians, who counter-signal by holding opinions contrary to those of the contrarians' signals. And in the case of death, this cannot but be a good thing.
But just as contrarians risk becoming too contrary, moving from "actually, death has a few side benefits" to "DEATH IS GREAT!", meta-contrarians are at risk of becoming too meta-contrary.
All the possible examples here are controversial, so I will just take the least controversial one I can think of and beg forgiveness. A naive person might think that industrial production is an absolute good thing. Someone smarter than that naive person might realize that global warming is a strong negative to industrial production and desperately needs to be stopped. Someone even smarter than that, to differentiate emself from the second person, might decide global warming wasn't such a big deal after all, or doesn't exist, or isn't man-made.
In this case, the contrarian position happened to be right (well, maybe), and the third person's meta-contrariness took em further from the truth. I do feel like there are more global warming skeptics among what Eliezer called "the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer empirical cluster in personspace" than among, say, college professors.
In fact, very often, the uneducated position of the five year old child may be deeply flawed and the contrarian position a necessary correction to those flaws. This makes meta-contrarianism a very dangerous business.
Remember, most everyone hates hipsters.
Without meaning to imply anything about whether or not any of these positions are correct or not3, the following triads come to mind as connected to an uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide:
- KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically proven genetic differences"
- misogyny / women's rights movement / men's rights movement
- conservative / liberal / libertarian4
- herbal-spiritual-alternative medicine / conventional medicine / Robin Hanson
- don't care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don't give aid to Africa
- Obama is Muslim / Obama is obviously not Muslim, you idiot / Patri Friedman5
What is interesting about these triads is not that people hold the positions (which could be expected by chance) but that people get deep personal satisfaction from arguing the positions even when their arguments are unlikely to change policy6 - and that people identify with these positions to the point where arguments about them can become personal.
If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so.
Footnotes
1) But what's really interesting here is that people at each level of the pyramid don't just follow the customs of their level. They enjoy following the customs, it makes them feel good to talk about how they follow the customs, and they devote quite a bit of energy to insulting the people on the other levels. For example, old money call the nouveau riche "crass", and men who don't need to pursue women call those who do "chumps". Whenever holding a position makes you feel superior and is fun to talk about, that's a good sign that the position is not just practical, but signaling related.
2) There is no need to point out just how unlikely it is that such a number is correct, nor how unscientific the survey was.
3) One more time: the fact that those beliefs are in an order does not mean some of them are good and others are bad. For example, "5 year old child / pro-death / transhumanist" is a triad, and "warming denier / warming believer / warming skeptic" is a triad, but I personally support 1+3 in the first triad and 2 in the second. You can't evaluate the truth of a statement by its position in a signaling game; otherwise you could use human psychology to figure out if global warming is real!
4) This is my solution to the eternal question of why libertarians are always more hostile toward liberals, even though they have just about as many points of real disagreement with the conservatives.
5) To be fair to Patri, he admitted that those two posts were "trolling", but I think the fact that he derived so much enjoyment from trolling in that particular way is significant.
6) Worth a footnote: I think in a lot of issues, the original uneducated position has disappeared, or been relegated to a few rednecks in some remote corner of the world, and so meta-contrarians simply look like contrarians. I think it's important to keep the terminology, because most contrarians retain a psychology of feeling like they are being contrarian, even after they are the new norm. But my only evidence for this is introspection, so it might be false.