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

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

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Comment author: DanielVarga 19 April 2012 12:08:46PM *  13 points [-]

Others already noted that we need contrary opinions more than contrarian people per se. Let me make another distinction. Is the goal a community with a diverse set of opinions, or more people who are vocal and articulate about some minority opinion? Maybe the latter goal is worth working on, but I suspect the former has already been reached. Let me go with myself as an example. I don't think anybody ever saw any of my comments as contrarian, and I am sure nobody associates my nick with contrarianism. The thing is: I would bet against Many Worlds. I am not a consequentialist. I am not really interested in cryonics. I think the flavor of decision theory practiced here is just cool math without foreseeable applications. I give very low probability to FOOM. I think FAI as a goal is unfeasible, for more than one reason.

I am not vocal at all about these positions, and you will very rarely see me engage in loud debates. But I state my position when I feel like it, and I was never punished for that. (I don't have any negatively voted comment out of a few hundred.) I think we would see a similar pattern when checking the positions of other individual "non-contrarian" commenters.

Comment author: thomblake 19 April 2012 08:51:15PM 5 points [-]

You should make some discussion posts about your reasons for disagreeing with the perceived consensus on each of those issues. If they are articulate, specific, and uses the techniques of epistemic rationality, they should be well-received. (If you have good reasons for disagreeing with the techniques of epistemic rationality, then that's an even better post).

Comment author: vi21maobk9vp 20 April 2012 06:05:03PM 1 point [-]

If I have seen the replies to well-written comments expressing some opinions, I may find it unlikely that I would get new information from replies to a discussion post.

And I may have some hard-to-share reasons and personal red flags, so I do not know whether I will do good to anyone.

So, why bother?

Maybe original poster wouldn't agree with this approach, but his behaviour is consistent with it.