Will_Newsome comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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Looking back I think I read more into your comments than was really there; I apologize.
I agree here. The debate is over whether or not the current situation is normal.
Tentatively agreed. Normally, even if nanotech's gonna kill everyone, you're not able to do much about it anyway. But I'm not sure why you bring up "Expending resources fighting DOOM usually just means you get gradually squeezed out of the gene pool." when most people aren't at all trying to optimize the amount of copies of their genes in the gene pool.
Generally this is true, especially before science was around to make such meme pushing low status. But it's also very true of global warming paranoia, which is high status even among intellectuals for some reason. (I should probably try to figure out why.) I readily admit that certain values of outside view will jump from that to 'and so all possible DOOM-pushing groups are just trying to signal altruism or swindle people' -- but rationality should help you win, and a sufficiently good rationalist should trust themselves to try and beat the outside view here.
So maybe instead of saying 'poor epistemology' I should say 'odd emphasis on outside view when generally people trust their epistemology better than that beyond a certain point of perceived rationality in themselves'.