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

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

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Comment author: steven0461 13 September 2010 11:16:48PM *  25 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 07 January 2011 02:42:17PM 0 points [-]

I'm a little sad that I've integrated this pretty thoroughly into my epistemology because it's a very good point and yet most people probably missed this comment.

Comment author: shokwave 07 January 2011 03:14:15PM 0 points [-]

Thank-you for commenting and bringing this to my attention. This also makes for a fantastic "shut down the contrarian" response when your meta-contrarianism is questioned.