How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

Wei Dai

I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.

For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas:

Try to "fix" them by telling them that they are overconfident and give them hints about how to get LW to take their ideas seriously. Unfortunately, from their perspective such advice must appear to come from someone who is themselves overconfident and wrong, so they're not likely to be very inclined to accept the advice.
Create a separate section with different social norms, where people are not expected to maintain the "proper" level of confidence and niceness (on pain of being downvoted), and direct overconfident newcomers to it. Perhaps through no-holds-barred debate we can convince them that we're not as crazy and wrong as they thought, and then give them the above-mentioned advice and move them to the main sections.
Give newcomers some sort of honeymoon period (marked by color-coding of their usernames or something like that), where we ignore their overconfidence and associated social transgressions (or just be extra nice and tolerant towards them), and take their ideas on their own merits. Maybe if they see us take their ideas seriously, that will cause them to reciprocate and take us more seriously when we point out that they may be wrong or overconfident.

I guess these ideas sounded better in my head than written down, but maybe they'll inspire other people to think of better ones. And it might help a bit just to keep this issue in the back of one's mind and occasionally think strategically about how to improve the person you're arguing against, instead of only trying to win the particular argument at hand or downvoting them into leaving.

P.S., after writing most of the above, I saw this post:

OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason.

To be clear, I don't think "group think" is the problem. In other words, it's not that we're refusing to accept valid criticisms, but more like our group dynamics (and other factors) cause there to be fewer good contrarians in our community than is optimal. Of course what is optimal might be open to debate, but from my perspective, it can't be right that my own criticisms are valued so highly (especially since I've been moving closer to the SingInst "inner circle" and my critical tendencies have been decreasing). In the spirit of making oneself redundant, I'd feel much better if my occasional voice of dissent is just considered one amongst many.

Try to "fix" them by telling them that they are overconfident and give them hints about how to get LW to take their ideas seriously. Unfortunately, from their perspective such advice must appear to come from someone who is themselves overconfident and wrong, so they're not likely to be very inclined to accept the advice.
Create a separate section with different social norms, where people are not expected to maintain the "proper" level of confidence and niceness (on pain of being downvoted), and direct overconfident newcomers to it. Perhaps through no-holds-barred debate we can convince them that we're not as crazy and wrong as they thought, and then give them the above-mentioned advice and move them to the main sections.
Give newcomers some sort of honeymoon period (marked by color-coding of their usernames or something like that), where we ignore their overconfidence and associated social transgressions (or just be extra nice and tolerant towards them), and take their ideas on their own merits. Maybe if they see us take their ideas seriously, that will cause them to reciprocate and take us more seriously when we point out that they may be wrong or overconfident.

P.S., after writing most of the above, I saw this post:

OTOH, I don’t think group think is a big problem. Criticism by folks like Will Newsome, Vladimir Slepnev and especially Wei Dai is often upvoted. (I upvote almost every comment of Dai or Newsome if I don’t forget it. Dai makes always very good points and Newsome is often wrong but also hilariously funny or just brilliant and right.) Of course, folks like this Dymytry guy are often downvoted, but IMO with good reason.

The General Contrarian Heuristic:

Assume these and such people who claim to be right actually are at-least-somewhat-straightforwardly right, and they have good evidence or arguments that you're just not aware of. (There are many plausible reasons for your ignorance; e.g. for the longest time I thought Christianity and ufology were just obviously stupid, because I'd only read atheist/skeptic/scientismist diatribes. What evidence filtered evidence?) What is the most plausible evidence or argument that can be found while searching in good faith? This often splits in two directions:
- The Vassarian steel method: E.g., you hear lots of stuff about fairies, so you go digging around and find Charles Bonnet syndrome. This might be akin to constructing steel men, but beware!, for it is often a path to sophistry & syncretism. You know how in Dan Brown novels he keeps constructing these shallow connections between spirituality and science in order to show that they're not actually at odds? Don't be Dan Brown.
- The Newsomelike schizophrenic method: You find Charles Bonnet syndrome but decide that even that isn't enough—you postulate that daimons are taking advantage of any plausible excuse (e.g. stroke, optical damage, sleep paralysis) to manipulate people into delusion. (You then independently re-derive justifications for burning witches or whatever, 'cuz why not?) This might be akin to paranoid schizophrenia, but beware!, for it is often the path to, um, paranoid schizophrenia.

Some contrarian topics I've had fun exploring:

Assume UFO phenomena and Marian apparitions are legit, i.e. caused by some transhumanly powerful process. E.g., the Miracle at Fatima. What would be the mechanism? More pertinently, what would be the motivations?
Assume legit retroscausal psi effects in parapsychology: What would be the mechanism?
Assuming it is legit, i.e. retrocausal results are legit, why is psi capricious?
Assume intelligent life isn't fantastically unlikely. Why no signs of intelligent life? (Related to "why is psi capricious" question.)

Remember, skepticism is easy, it's the default position: if the phenomenon you're modeling is actually complex, your explanation will have to be subtle. It's always too easy to shout "confirmation bias", "mass hallucination", "memetic selection pressures", and what have you. Don't fall for that trap; it's just as much of an error as the Dan Brown trap—maybe moreso, because at least the Dan Brown trap doesn't tell you to ignore important evidence.

If you make an argument along the lines of "the prior probability of that hypothesis is low", deduct 10 of your contrarian points. If you make a reference to the universal prior, deduct 20 points and feel guilty for the next few weeks.

Note that I think I'm a decent contrarian but I'm bad at communicating contrarian ideas; I'm not sure to what extent this is a personal quirk or a general problem when talking to people who start out assuming that you're crazy/deluded/trolling/whatever. If there is a General Contrarian Heuristic that's more amenable to communicating resultant insights then maybe that heuristic is better.

"May we not forget interpretations consistent with the evidence, even at the cost of overweighting them."

For comparison, the General Chess Heuristic: Think about a move you could make, think about the moves your opponent could make in reply, think about what moves you could make if they replied with any of those candidate moves, &c.; evaluate all possible resultant positions, subject to search heuristics and time constraints.

What's interesting is that novice chess players reliably forget to even consider what moves their opponent could make; their thought process barely includes the opponent's possible thought process as a fundamental subroutine. I think ... (read more)

14komponisto14y

Upvoted. The easiest way to get the wrong answer is to never have considered the right answer. I've always thought that imagination belonged on the list of rationalist virtues.

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How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

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How can we get more and better LW contrarians?

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