duckduckMOO comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 April 2012 10:01PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (328)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: duckduckMOO 19 April 2012 12:19:56PM *  2 points [-]

haven't read yet but you can start by not calling anyone who disagrees with the established view a contrarian. It implies anyone who disagrees is doing so to play out a role rather than out of actual disagreement.

edit: so it seems that people who are playing out a role is exactly what you want more of. I assumed you were using "how can we get more contrarians" as codespeak for how can we get more disagreement. If you just want more actual "contrarians", well, I'm not sure "contrarians" is a real category. In any case it's not the relevant category. What you want is people who like criticising things, not people who like disagreeing with established opinion (again I really have to emphasise how ridiculous the way "contrarian" is used is. It's blatantly a story someone has made up to ad hominem away criticisms of standard ideas.)

For my part I would not feel comfortable finding fault in everything I see here. I know I can do it, I just don't think it would go down well. Not that it tends to go down well many other places either. part of the problem is something like people being too comfortable talking in terms of e.g. evolution's intentions so good criticisms can be dismissed as pedantry.

I might make a contrarian account though and see how well that goes down.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 04:41:22AM 0 points [-]

It implies anyone who disagrees is doing so to play out a role rather than out of actual disagreement.

I don't think that's the standard definition of contrarian.