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wedrifid comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
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Maybe we could have a "contrarian of the month" award? This could also encourage normally agreeable Less Wrong users to argue against consensus positions in hopes of winning the award.
Can we please not do this? I already feel a pre-emptive contrarian outrage against whatever consensus is arrived at when awarding this "official contrarily" award. Then I start thinking of court Jesters. This is a way to get people to think in the predetermined 'outside the box box' and change their 'mainstream' uniform to the 'rebel' uniform. That's not the way to get useful contrarians.
You're advocating this as a good thing?
Are you suggesting folks can't be trusted to reliably identify genuinely high-quality opinions that disagree with theirs?
What can we learn from this thread?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/
The OP talks about folks who "like to find fault in every idea they see". Assuming this is valuable, there are two ways to have this kind of person: be this kind of person naturally, or unnaturally in order to win an award.
Keep in mind that the award's specifications can be changed, for example, "best civil disagreement with LW majority" or "changed the most minds among LW users".
(Anybody is welcome to copy/paste/edit that post and run it again, probably in Main because the less casual nature of Main discourages accidental failure to read the rules. Also, I noticed that a lot of the rules weren't really necessary because people did reliably play in the spirit of the game; most of the rules are along the lines of 'don't cheat'. So if you re-run it you might want to remove a lot of the text. FWIW I'd upvote it and probably make a lot of comments.)
I would change the rules to go something like this: Write a one sentence summary of your conclusion first, in as shocking terms as possible. Get people to vote up or down based on whether they agree with the initial one sentence summary. Then you justify the one sentence summary in subsequent paragraphs, which might cause folks to change their mind. That way we could get novel but possibly true beliefs in addition to irrational beliefs at the top.
Or rethink the game entirely along these lines so it is the "More Plausible Than I Initially Thought Game", so we don't get things like UFOs at the top. Participants upvote those comments that cause the maximum change to their beliefs, especially by making something surprising seem at least vaguely plausible. I dislike the current game rules somewhat because it seems like a signaling fest.
FWIW I'm really glad that UFOs were at the top. The resultant discussion and links to articles about Fatima contributed to me doing a lot of serious thinking and ultimately changing my mind, and now I believe in "hyperdimensional"/demonic/high-weirdness explanations for UFOs.
Your variation on the game still sounds better, though, 'cuz it focuses on marginals which are clearly more important here.