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JQuinton comments on Is my view contrarian? - Less Wrong
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Doesn't "contrarian" just mean "disagrees with the majority"? Any further logic-chopping seems pointless and defensive.
The fact that 98% of people are theists is evidence against atheism. I'm perfectly happy to admit this. I think there is other, stronger evidence for atheism, but the contrarian heuristic definitely argues for belief in God.
Similarly, believing that cryonics is a good investment is obviously contrarian. AGI is harder to say; most people probably haven't thought about it.
It seems like the question you're really trying to answer is "what is a good prior belief for things I am not an expert on?"
(I'm sorry about arguing over terminology, which is usually stupid, but this case seems egregious to me).
On the face of it, I also think that the fact that the majority believes something is evidence for that something. But then what about how consensus belief is also a function of time period?
How many times over the course of all human history has the consensus of average people been wrong about some fact about the universe? The consensus of say, what causes disease back in 1400 BCE is different than the consensus about the same today. What's to say that this same consensus won't point to something different 3400 years in the future?
It seems that looking at how many times the consensus has been wrong over the course of human history is actually evidence that "consensus" -- without qualification (e.g. consensus of doctors, etc.) -- is more likely to be wrong than right; the consensus seems to be weak evidence against said position.
Seems to me that we're more likely to remember instances where the expert consensus was wrong than instances where it wasn't. The consensus among Classical Greek natural philosophers in 300 BC was that the earth was round, and it turns out they were absolutely right.
And I can only pick that out as an example because of the later myth regarding Christopher Columbus et al. There are probably hundreds of cases where consensus, rather than being overturned by some new paradigm, withstood all challenges and slowly fossilized into common knowledge.