ciphergoth 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: ciphergoth 07 January 2011 03:35:54PM *  0 points [-]

I think that this only works if positions are in one dimension. If they are in many dimensions then I suspect that the truth and the uneducated opinion are on the same side of the contrarian opinion as often as they are on opposite sides.

EDIT: I no longer think the above makes any sense. I'm tired, sorry!