army1987 comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: gwern 26 October 2014 10:34:03PM 3 points [-]

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".

Comment author: [deleted] 27 October 2014 04:35:25PM 2 points [-]

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".

Meh. Mankind survived the mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu hardly scathed; why should it be different this time around?

Comment author: gwern 27 October 2014 09:34:03PM 4 points [-]
  1. human deaths are not irrelevant; a million deaths != no deaths.
  2. pandemics are existential threats, which can drive species extinct; I trust you understand why 'mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu' are not counter-arguments to this point.
Comment author: [deleted] 28 October 2014 08:20:05AM *  0 points [-]

I trust you understand why 'mad cow, the SARS, the bird flu and the swine flu' are not counter-arguments to this point.

No, I don't.

EDIT: Anthropics?

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