They advocate (possible wrong) opinions to signal that they stand out of the crowd. Did I unpack that right?
Not to ones that they themselves suspect are wrong, if that's what you mean. But it's hard to signal high intellectual status while expressing the same beliefs as all of your peers, so if you want to signal, you have a motive to find a point of disagreement.
There are several posters on Less Wrong whom I
So I think they are exceptionally smart people whose judgement is consistently worse than if they flipped a coin.
How probable is this?
Some theories: