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How can we get more and better LW contrarians?
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.
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.
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Comments (328)
It's so difficult to find someone who will communicate on our level and yet disagrees on object-level things.
Probably the best way to get more contrarians, is for folks from Less Wrong to learn from people outside the community, change their own beliefs because of it, and come back to share their wisdom with the masses.
Okay, that sounded better in my head too.
Is this because people smart enough to communicate on our level largely agree with a lot of what is generally agreed on here, for the same reason that most people all agree that 2+2=4?
Or is it because LessWrong is, for reasons unconnected with rationality, largely drawn from a certain very narrow demographic range, who grab onto this constellation of ideas like an enzyme to its substrate, and "communicating on our level" just means being that sort of person?
Probably both, mostly the latter. Noting that "being that sort of person" refers to the demographic range, and not necessarily agreeing with those ideas.
Maybe we could have a "contrarian of the month" award? This could also encourage normally agreeable Less Wrong users to argue against consensus positions in hopes of winning the award.
Would this award have content?
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
I'm thinking it would go something like this: users would be encouraged to track examples of contrarian contributions. At the end of the month, there would be a nomination process (with pointers to examples of contrary statements) and then voting on who was the best contrarian. (Whoever maximizes quality of statements * degree of disagreement with other users at the time they wrote the statements. Number of contrary statements made could also be a multiplier, although that might be a bad idea if we want to avoid flooding LW with disagreeable contributions. Come to think of it, "contrarian contribution of the month might be a better award".)
Allowing users to nominate themselves seems like a generally good idea, in case we are subconsciously avoiding our beliefs' real weak points, and to fight availability bias (individual users are more likely to remember good contrary comments they made early on in the month). There's probably no reason not to keep the registry open for nominations all month long.
If you're asking if there will be an award, maybe we could give them karma somehow? Personally, I suspect just winning the title will be a significant motivator.
An interesting variation would be to encourage established users to create alternate accounts to be contrary with, and only step out from behind the alternate account if they won the award.
One problem is quantifying the degree of disagreement. For instance, in one sense this recent discussion post of mine is very much in line with stereotyped opinions of what Less Wrong thinks, but in another sense, it got a substantial number of votes down (was negative for a good while after I created it) and the top-rated comment on it, voted much higher than the post itself, expresses disagreement. So was I being contrarian or not?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfy/you_only_live_once_a_reframing_of_working_towards/
Another idea is for contrary posts to specifically state that they are nominating themselves for the award within the body of the post. This could create a different dynamic when responding to the post, if it was explicitly pointed out that the post was something you might disagree with but might be correct anyway. (Probably not that good of an idea.)
Can we please not do this? I already feel a pre-emptive contrarian outrage against whatever consensus is arrived at when awarding this "official contrarily" award. Then I start thinking of court Jesters. This is a way to get people to think in the predetermined 'outside the box box' and change their 'mainstream' uniform to the 'rebel' uniform. That's not the way to get useful contrarians.
You're advocating this as a good thing?
Are you suggesting folks can't be trusted to reliably identify genuinely high-quality opinions that disagree with theirs?
What can we learn from this thread?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2sl/the_irrationality_game/
The OP talks about folks who "like to find fault in every idea they see". Assuming this is valuable, there are two ways to have this kind of person: be this kind of person naturally, or unnaturally in order to win an award.
Keep in mind that the award's specifications can be changed, for example, "best civil disagreement with LW majority" or "changed the most minds among LW users".
(Anybody is welcome to copy/paste/edit that post and run it again, probably in Main because the less casual nature of Main discourages accidental failure to read the rules. Also, I noticed that a lot of the rules weren't really necessary because people did reliably play in the spirit of the game; most of the rules are along the lines of 'don't cheat'. So if you re-run it you might want to remove a lot of the text. FWIW I'd upvote it and probably make a lot of comments.)
I would change the rules to go something like this: Write a one sentence summary of your conclusion first, in as shocking terms as possible. Get people to vote up or down based on whether they agree with the initial one sentence summary. Then you justify the one sentence summary in subsequent paragraphs, which might cause folks to change their mind. That way we could get novel but possibly true beliefs in addition to irrational beliefs at the top.
Or rethink the game entirely along these lines so it is the "More Plausible Than I Initially Thought Game", so we don't get things like UFOs at the top. Participants upvote those comments that cause the maximum change to their beliefs, especially by making something surprising seem at least vaguely plausible. I dislike the current game rules somewhat because it seems like a signaling fest.
FWIW I'm really glad that UFOs were at the top. The resultant discussion and links to articles about Fatima contributed to me doing a lot of serious thinking and ultimately changing my mind, and now I believe in "hyperdimensional"/demonic/high-weirdness explanations for UFOs.
Your variation on the game still sounds better, though, 'cuz it focuses on marginals which are clearly more important here.
I'm not sure how much I like this idea (or the version I'm about to propose) but I think it would be better to treat it as a "Contrarian Quotes of the Month" type thing, kind of like the Rationality Quotes thread but using contrarian lesswrong comments.
Awarded to a nonconformist in black or a nonconformist in a clown suit? The latter is likely to get the tone argument (where someone's claimed rejection is the tone of the statement rather than its content).
Suggestion: whenever you're tempted to respond with a tone argument ("stop being so rude/dismissive/such a flaming arsehole/etc"), try really hard to respond to the substance as if the tone is lovely. The effort will net you upvotes ;-)
Whatever kind of contrarian Less Wrong thinks is valuable. It's not completely specified. I'm not sure I see how tone comes in.
I'm thinking of the responses to critics of late. Even the arseholes are slightly worth listening to, but tone arguments are a way of not listening, and this may miss something important even if it's often all the response it deserves. No-one's obligated not to use it, but it's a good exercise to be able not to, particularly for the benefit of onlookers.
Of course, listening doesn't leave a record, so it's hard to tell how many people are listening. It's the relative handful of people who reply who define the perceived tone of the site's response.
Or are you suggesting that responding to the substance is a better strategy than simply listening?
Hmmm. Driving readers away in such a way that they don't even respond strikes me as bad. But in working out what to do about this, I'm left with asking my other-people-simulator, which I strongly suspect will just hand me back the results of typical mind fallacy.
Seconding your suggestion because it's worked well for me every time I found the strength to use it. Also, when you feel really aggravated at your opponent's tone, fogging is a useful and civil-sounding technique.
For a good example, note how wonderful Wei Dai's tone consistently is, even when responding to comments where "go away you idiot" would be a quite reasonable reaction.
That took forever for me to figure out. Wikipedia:Fogging.
Worked well in what sense? David talked about netting upvotes, but surely that's not a main consideration for you at this point. I'm hoping that being nice and responding just to substance might make the other person less belligerent and a better contributor to the community. I tried this on Dmytry and it didn't work, but I wonder if it has worked in the past on others. Do you or anyone else have any anecdotes in this regard?
Avoiding flame wars. Leaving the 'contrarian' at least with the sense that some of their ideas have been heard and validated. Reducing the extent to which you yourself get caught up in negative spirals. All without enabling them or encouraging more undesired behavior.
Hmm, you're right, I just checked and it has never worked on rude people for me either. I must've been thinking about my exchanges with some people who were confident and confused about an issue, but not rude. Sorry.
It nets upvotes because it produces a useful response post for the onlookers, who have the votes. This is why it's work, because it involves turning an annoying post into something of value.
I would love to be better at contrarianism, but I don't know where to begin.
I got where I am today mostly through trial and error.
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:
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."
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.
"What do you think are the rationalist virtues?" might be an interesting discussion post.
I like that a lot.
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 novice rationalists make the same error (where "opponent" is "person or group of people who disagree with me"), and unfortunately, unlike in chess, they don't often get any feedback alerting them to their mistake.
(Interestingly, Roko once almost defeated me in chess despite having significantly less experience than me, because he just thought really hard and reliably calculated a ton of lines. I'd never seen anyone do that successfully, and was very impressed. I would've lost except he made a silly blunder in the endgame. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.)
If we have less contrarianism than is optimal, it seems like the root of the problem is that people often vote for agreement rather than for expected added value. I would start looking there for a solution.
Also, the site would be able to absorb more contrarians if their bad contributions didn't cause as much damage. It would help if we exercised better judgment in deciding when a criticism is worth engaging with and when we should just stop feeding the trolls.
Change the mouseovers on the thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons from "Vote up"/"Vote down" to "More like this"/"Less like this". I've suggested this before and it got upvotes, I suggest now it might be time to implement it.
Hmm. Or "Reward"/"Punish"? "Incent"/"Disincent"? "Carrot"/"Stick"?
"I like your comment, so I more like thissed it" doesn't roll off the tongue.
Please, no. As far as I'm concerned, an upvote or downvote, by me or on my posts, is not a reward or a punishment. Not even slightly.
So much the better. I am not interested in who has upvoted or downvoted me, and I never mention my own votes.
I agree that reward/punish doesn't quite capture the intended meaning. The other suggestions I edited in also have that problem.
Even if we're not mentioning votes, there are various other reasons why we might want to talk about the process of voting.
I kind of like "I like your comment, so I morepleased it".
I think you're wrong there. Humans are exquisitely sensitive to status, anywhere they see anything that looks even slightly like it. Upvotes/downvotes are precisely rewards/punishments, whatever else they may be or whatever you may intend yours to be.
I want to go around carroting things.
All I could think of was this. (deep link, ten seconds long).
(Warning: Homestuck fandom, implausibly unsafe for work, unless your boss is into Homestuck.)
"Bouquet"/"Brickbat".
I think this would discourage me from writing contrary stuff. Right now if I get voted down, I explain it to myself as me having an unpopular but possibly correct opinion. Hearing that people want "less like this" seems harsh somehow.
This is the pro-airbrushing argument; airbrushing in magazines decreases body neurosis because it gives girls plausible deniability for why they don't look like models.
I saw this not to pass judgement either way on your argument.
Does airbrushing actually work to decrease body neurosis? My impression is that it doesn't. However, mannikins seem to cause less damage, possibly because they're less realisitic looking.
Isn't that the point? A stimuli that is insufficiently strong to change behavior is pointless to use for behavior modification.
I think of it as "Pay more attention to this" / "Pay less attention to this." Communicating primarily to other readers rather than to posters.
You should call it black and white. Because that's what it is, black and white thinking.
Just think about it : using nothing more than one bit of non normalized information by compressing the opinion of people who use wildly variable judgement criteria, from variable populations (different people care and vote for different topics).
Then you're going to tell me it "works nonetheless", that it self-corrects because several (how many do you really need to obtain such a self-correction effect?) people are aggregating their opinions and that people usually mean it to say "more / less of this please". But what's your evidence for it working? The quality of the discussion here? How much of that stems from the quality of the public, and the quality of the base material such as Eliezer's sequence?
Do you realize that judgements like "more / less of this" may well optimize less than you think for content, insight, or epistemic hygiene, and more than it should for stuff that just amuses and pleases people? Jokes, famous quotes, group-think, ego grooming, etc.
People optimizing for "more like this" eventually downgrades content into lolcats and porn. It's crude wireheading. I'm not saying this community isn't somewhat above going that deep, but we're still human beings and therefore still susceptible to it.
I've noticed that humor gets a lot of upvotes compared to good but non-funny comments. However, humor hasn't taken over, probably because being funny can take some thought.
I don't think karma conveys a lot of information at this point, though heavily upvoted articles tend to be good, and I've given up on reading down-voted articles, with a possible exception of those that get a significant number of comments.
Don't you technically need at least two bits ? There are three states: "downvoted", "upvoted", and "not voted at all".
True, except you don't know how many people didn't vote (i.e. we don't keep track of that : a comment at 0 could as well have been read and voted as "0" by 0, 1, 10 or a hundred people and is the default state anyway.)(We similarly can't know if a comment is controversial, that is, how many upvotes and downvotes went into the aggregated score).
The system does keep track of how everyone voted, though; it needs to do that in order to render the thumbs up/down buttons as green or gray. wedrifid is right though; using suitable compression, you might be able to get away with less than two bits (in aggregate).
One and a half if you can find a suitable compression algorithm. I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility but it may be counter-intuitive.
More so than "vote up"? You've made a statement here that looks like it should be supported by evidence. What sites do you know of this happening from going from "vote up" to "more of this"?
Not more so than "vote up".
In this case I don't think both are significantly different. They both don't convey a lot of information, both are very noisy, and a lot of people seem to already mean "more like this" when they "vote up" anyway.
I don't think it was clear from the context that you were arguing against the practice of community moderation in general. I also don't think you supported your case anywhere near well enough to justify your verbal vehemence. Was this a test/demonstration of Wei Dai's point about intolerance of overconfident newcomers with different ideas?
This is a seriously fucking awesome suggestion! Do it!
Stupid alternative: Instead of up/down, have blue/green. Let chaos reign as people arbitrarily assign meaning.
Predicted outcome: within a couple of weeks, blue/green will have understood but undocumented positive/negative associations. Votes will be noisier, though, thanks mostly to confused newcomers and the occasional contrarian pursuing an idiosyncratic interpretation. Complaints about downvotes, and color politics jokes, will both become more common.
p = 0.7 contingent on implementation for core claim, .5-6 range for corollaries.
0.7 strikes me as low.
Proposed chaotic refinement: Blue/green, but switch them every 18 to 30 hours (randomly sampled, uniform distribution).
(ETA: Upon reflection days or weeks would be better, to increase chaos/noise ratio. Would also work better with prominent "top contributors for last 30 days" lists for both blue and green, and more adulation/condemnation based on those lists.)
Classic Will_Newsome. Greenvoted.
BLUE!!
... well, it said blue when I clicked on it ...
Frankly I think we should reconsider the early suggestion that karma on comments should be between
0and1, starting at0.5.1 and 999. No doubt someone will write a script to render the number in decibels ...
Edited wiki.
Useful edit.
I don't see a problem with driving "contrarians" away. That is what we should be doing.
To be a "contrarian" is to have written a bottom line already: disagree with everything everyone else agrees with.
To be a "contrarian" among smart people is to adopt reversed intelligence as a method of intelligence.
To be a "contrarian" among stupid people is, like American football, something that you have to be smart enough to do but stupid enough to think worth doing.
To be a "contrarian" is to limit oneself to writing against. I am not interested in what anyone is against until I have seen what they are for.
To be a "contrarian" is the safe and easy path. It is easy, because you can find good arguments against everything, as nothing is perfect. It is safe, for you can take agreement and disagreement alike as confirmation. Like most safe and easy paths, nothing is achieved along it.
To style oneself a "contrarian" is a giant red warning light that the person has nothing useful to say. That rule has not failed me yet.
I think there's a difference between "contrarian about X" and "contrarian". The former has (hopefully) looked at the evidence around X and come to a position on X that differs from the mainstream. The latter values being different over being right.
I think the first sort can be valuable, and shouldn't be driven away.
Wei Dai's first sentence only talks about the second sort, and I wouldn't call someone who has come to a position on X that differs from the mainstream a "contrarian about X". If they call themselves that, then instead of simply being able to present their arguments, they have tied their identity to being in opposition, and the whole downward spiral I described comes into play.
There's no problem with identifying with arguments and wanting to defend certain positions if you are open to arguments and evidence against your position. It's actually convenient to do so for the purposes of discussion and advocacy.
Most people here are probably "transhumanists", which connects their beliefs to their identity, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't change their mind or alter their beliefs if they see evidence against transhumanism. Describing specific traits that apply to you and your positions shouldn't make you reluctant to change your positions, and also identifying with specific advocacy groups is probably inevitable.
I don't think you're really addressing what Wei Dai's original post is actually discussing. I think that it should be apparent that Wei Dai isn't advocating having more closeminded commenters, but is advocating a more diverse set of viewpoints and advocacies. You're dismissing the overall idea was trying to be reached at based on an interpretation of "contrarian" that doesn't make sense when viewed in the context of the advocacy statement within the original post. Even if you're right about what "contrarian" means, please mentally replace every instance of "contrarian" with "person advocating something unpopular", and that will make this discussion much more productive.
I agree that tying one's identity to opposition specifically is bad, though. That's political paralysis as a consequence of misguided cynicism. If you reject every position then you can advocate nothing. That's not just ineffective, it's a horrible way to live. Affirmation is good.
As far as I know Wei Dai is male.
I've met him in person, and this is the case.
I realized while writing the post that I didn't know his gender and proceeded to edit as fast as I could but you people still caught the mistake before I fixed it, I'm embarrassed. At least it's better to use "she" than "he" as my default assumption (balances against gendered language in favor of men, etc). Although on second thought it probably indicates that I associate civility with females which is stupid and unfair and can't be intentionally controlled by me anyways so it's not really worth lamenting.
But, sorry, Wei Dai, although it was just an accident and I doubt you'll care much.
It makes a difference that there are some Wei Dais that are female.
I probably wouldn't default to associating anti-consensus advocacy with female. That goes against a notorious (and as far as I know reasonably well founded) stereotype.
I was thinking and perceiving in terms of tone rather than in terms of advocacy statement.
Someone else mentioned somewhere that essentially Wei Dai is very good at disagreeing politely.
Yes, being a "contrarian" is irrational for the individual, but may be good for the group. I wouldn't try to turn someone into a "contrarian" for my own benefits, but I don't feel qualms about making better use of people who already are.
I sometimes argue in favor of positions I don't really believe (i.e., assign p<.5 to) if I think the probability is higher than general consensus and I suspect at least Will Newsome frequently does the same.
Yes, but it's often a hassle. You risk being accused of trolling, overconfidence, &c., and it's difficult to claim that such accusations don't have some tinge of truth.
I suspect it's not overall a very good habit and that I bring it to LessWrong mostly because it happens to work well in my personal rationality practice. On LessWrong it's probably better to put in a little extra work to find a way to go meta—don't support a side, but show clear not-introspectively-obvious reasons why someone could hold a belief that was to them introspectively obvious and thus difficult to explain. I generally like the anti-democracy LW commenters because they seem to have practiced this skill.
This comment should have 99 upvotes and should be moved to "Main" as a separate article. Then we should link it whenever the same topic appears again.
Reversing group-think is like reversing stupidity, or like an underconfidence at group level. It can be done. It can be interesting. But I prefer reading rational people's best estimates of reality. And I prefer disagreement based on genuine experience and belief, not because someone has felt a duty to artificially maintain diversity.
If you disagree with whatever, for example many-worlds interpretation, say it. Say "I disagree because of X and Y". Or say "I disagree, because if feels wrong, and because many people disagree, including some experts in the field (which is a good Bayesian evidence)". That's all OK. But don't say or imply things like "we should attract more people who disagree with many-world interpretation, to keep our discussion balanced". That is manipulating evidence.
If anything, we should discuss wider range of topics. Then naturally we will attract people who agree with N-1 topics, and disagree with 1 topic; and they will say it, and we will know they mean it.
Contrarians get to pick and choose their battle grounds. All they have to do to be right is to seek out places where a lot of people are wrong.
Upvote if you generally no longer post or discuss opinions that disagree with LW consensus.
Feel free to leave a comment on your experiences and reasons for this.
(If you would like to downvote this poll, please downvote the karma balance below instead, so that we can still get an accurate idea of the number of people who have this reaction.)
I'm curious, do you? If you do, why?
This poll is poorly designed; karma balances often get downvoted less than the vote options get upvoted, so this will tend to over-estimate how many people no longer dissent.
For example, when I loaded this page, this comment was at 5 and the karma balance was at -3
I have a proposal for a new structure for poll options:
The top-level post is just a statement of the idea, and voting has nothing to do with the poll. This can be omitted if the poll is an article.
A reply to this post is a "positive karma balance" - it should get no downvotes, and its score should be equal to the number of participants in the poll.
Two replies to the "positive karma balance" post, you downvote one to select this option in the poll.
This way voting either way in the poll has the same cost (one downvote), the enclosing post will have a high score (keeping it from being lost), and the only way to "corrupt" the poll results without leaving a trace [downvote the count post and upvote one of the option posts] simply cancels someone's vote without allowing you to make your own.
Or just embed a poll.
To me, when a karma balance is downvoted less than poll options are upvoted, it means that people think running the poll deserves some karma. This does not overestimate people who have reacted to voting patterns, since that number does not come from the karma balance. If someone (who has NOT reacted to voting patterns) wants to give karma for running the poll, they would upvote the karma balance, not the voting comment
Also, the purpose of the poll is to see whether a relatively high or relatively low amount of people have reacted to the voting patterns this way. Exact numbers are not needed.
(consensus)
And what do you mean "no longer"? Is the idea "upvote if your contrarianism has been downvoted out of you", or what?
silly typos. fixed, thanks!
Nitpick-- that should be the LW consensus, not LW census.
I have significantly decreased my participation on LW discussions recently, partly for reasons unrelated to whatever is going on here, but I have few issues with the present state of this site and perhaps they are relevant:
If you are afraid that LW could devolve into a dogmatic narrow community without enough contrarians to maintain high level of epistemic hygiene, don't try to spawn new contrarians by methods of social engineering. Instead try to encourage debates on diverse set of topics, mainly those which haven't been addressed by 246 LW articles already. If there is no consensus, people will disagree naturally.
Do you have examples of this sort of stuff so I can go vote it up?
For example there are many posts tagged "physics", most of which hover around zero. A moderately interesting puzzle stands now at -7.
This is a good point. Maybe future meta-discussions could be on talk pages for wiki articles, about specific changes to those articles, especially the about page and the FAQ? These actually represent how LW culture is being codified for new users, but unfortunately none of the recent debates seem to of resulted in substantial modification to them.
It's too bad that automatic wiki editing privileges don't come with a certain level of karma; would remove a trivial inconvenience and eliminate wiki spam.
I don't see how you could possibly be observing that trend. The earliest active comment threads on Less Wrong were voting / karma debates. Going meta is not only what we love best, it's what we're best at, and that's always been so.
Whut?
Links or it didn't happen.
I thought of this Mitchell Porter post on MWI and this puzzle post by Thomas. As it happens, I downvoted both (though after a while, I dropped the downvote from the latter) and would defend those downvotes, but I can see how prase gets the impression that we only upvote articles on a narrow subset of topics.
Wow. The first one is only at -2? That's troubling. Ahh, nevermind.
Yeah, both of those are low-quality.
As for physics, I was thinking more about this whose negative karma I have already commented on. In the meantime I have forgotten that the post managed to return to zero afterwards.
"Low-quality" is too general a justification to recognise the detailed reasons of downvotes. Among the more concrete criticisms I recall many "this is off-topic, hence my voting down" reactions. My memories may be subject to bias, of course, and I don't want to spend time making a more reliable statistics. What I am feeling more certain about is, however, that there are many people who wish to keep all debates relevant to rationality, which effectively denotes an accidental set of topics, roughly {AI, charity donations, meta-ethics, evolution psychology, self-improvement, cognitive biases, Bayesian probability}. No doubt those topics are interesting, even for me. But not so much to keep me engaged after three (or how much exactly) years of LW's existence. And since I disagree with many standard LW memes, I suppose there may be other potential "contrarians" (perhaps more willing to voice their disagreements than I am) becoming slowly disinterested for reasons similar to mine.
Yes, but the real question is why we love going meta. What is it about going meta that makes it worthwhile to us? Some have postulated that people here are actually addicted to going meta because it is easier to go meta than to actually do stuff, and yet despite the lack of real effort, you can tell yourself that going meta adds significant value because it helps change some insight or process once but seems to deliver recurring payoffs every time the insight or process is used again in the future...
...but I have a sneaking suspicion that this theory was just a pat answer that was offered as a status move, because going meta on going meta puts one in a position of objective examination of mere object level meta-ness. To understand something well helps one control the thing understood, and the understanding may have required power over the thing to learn the lessons in the first place. Clearly, therefore, going meta on a process would pattern match to being superior to the process or the people who perform it, which might push one's buttons if, for example, one were a narcissist.
I dare not speculate on the true meaning and function of going meta on going meta on going meta, but if I were forced to guess, I think it might have something to do with a sort of ironic humor over the appearance of mechanical repetitiveness as one iterates a generic "going meta" operation that some might naively have supposed to be the essence of human mental flexibility. Mental flexibility from a mechanical gimmick? Never!
Truly, we should all collectively pity the person who goes meta on going meta on going meta on going meta, because their ironically humorous detachment is such a shallow trick, and yet it is likely to leave them alienated from the world, and potentially bitter at its callous lack of self-aware appreciation for that person's jokes.
Related question: If the concept of meta is drawn from a distribution, or is an instance of a higher-level abstraction, what concept is best characterized by that distribution itself / that higher-level abstraction itself? If we seek whence cometh "seek whence", is the answer just "seek whence"? (Related: Schmidhuber's discussion about how Goedel machines collapse all the levels of meta-optimization into a single level. (Related: Eliezer's Loebian critique of Goedel machines.))
I laughed this morning when I read this, and thought "Yay! Theism!" which sort of demands being shortened to yaytheism... which sounds so much like atheism that the handful of examples I could find mostly occur in the context of atheism.
It would be funny to use the word "yaytheism" for what could be tabooed as "anthropomorphizing meta-aware computational idealism", because it frequently seems that humor is associated with the relevant thoughts :-)
But going anthropomorphic seems to me like playing with fire. Specifically: I suspect it helps with some emotional reactions and pedagogical limitations, but it seems able to cause non-productive emotional reactions and tenacious confusions as a side effect. For example, I think the most people are better off thinking about "natural selection" (mechanistic) over either "Azathoth, the blind idiot god" (anthropomorphic with negative valence) or "Gaia" (anthropomorphic with positive valence).
Edited To Add: You can loop this back to the question about contrarians, if you notice how much friction occurs around the tone of discussion of mind-shaped-stuff. You need to talk about mind-shaped-things when talking about cogsci/AI/singularity topics, but it's a "mindfield" of lurking faux paus and tribal triggers.
Do we love going meta? Yes, we do.
Are we good at it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no; it also depends on the individual. But going meta is good for signalling intelligence, so we do it even when it's just a waste of time.
Has it always been so? Yes, unpracticality and procrastination of many intelligent people is widely known.
It waxes and wanes. Try looking at all articles labeled "meta"; there were 10(!) in April of 2009 that fit your description of meta-debates (arguing about the karma system, the proper use of the wiki, the first survey, and an Eliezer post about getting less meta).
Granted, that was near the beginning of Less Wrong... but then there was another burst with 5 such articles in April 2010 as well. (I don't know what it is about springtime...) Starting the Discussion area in September 2010 seems to have siphoned most of it off of Main; there have been 3-5 meta-ish posts per month since then (except for April 2011, in which there were 9... seriously, what the hell is going on here?)
Maybe April Fools day gets people's juices going?
I'm not trying to spawn new contrarians for the sake of having more contrarians, nor want to encourage debate for the sake of having more disagreements. What I care about is (me personally as well as this community as a whole) having correct beliefs on the topics that I think are most important, namely the core rationality and Singularity-related topics, and I think having more contrarians who disagree about these core topics would help with that. Your suggestion doesn't seem to help with my goals, or at least it's not obvious to me how it would.
(BTW, I note that you've personally made 2 meta/community posts out of 7, whereas I've only made about 3 out of 58 (plus or minus a few counting errors). So maybe you can give me a pass on this one? :)
Do you also think that having more contrarians who disagree that "2+2=4" would increase our likelihood of having correct beliefs? I mean, if they are wrong, we will see the weakness in their arguments and refuse to update, so there is no harm; but if they are right and we are wrong, it could be very helpful.
More generally, what is your algorithm for deciding for which values of X we need more contrarians who disagree with X?
If people come to LessWrong thinking "2+2 != 4" or "computer manufacturing isn't science", is saying "You're stupid" really raising the sanity line in any way? In short, we should distinguish between punishing disagreement and punishing obstinate behavior/contrarianism.
I plead guilty and promise to avoid making meta posts in the future. (Edit: I don't object specifically to your meta-posts but to the overall relative number of meta discussions lately.)
Nevertheless, I doubt calling for more contrarians is helpful with respect to your purposes. The question how to increase the number of contrarians is naturally answered by proposals to create more contrarian-friendly environment, which, if implemented, attract disproportionally high amount of people who like to be contrarians, whatever the local orthodoxy is. My suggestion is, instead, to try to attract more diverse set of people, even those who are not interested in topics you consider important. You would profit indirectly, since some of them would get eventually engaged in your favourite discussions and bring fresh ideas. Incidentally they will also somewhat lower the level of discourse, but I am afraid it is an inevitable side effect of any anti-cult policy.
Having more contrarians would be bad for the signal to noise ratio on LW, which is already not as high as I'd like it to be. Can we obtain contrarian ideas more cheaply? For example, one could ask Carl Shulman for a list of promising counterarguments to X, rated by strength, and start digging from there. I'd be pretty interested to hear his responses for X=utilitarianism, the Singularity, FAI, or UDT.
Yes, a list of Carl's best arguments against standard positions is going to be of vastly higher quality than anything we would be likely to get from the best contrarians we can find.
If it's less signal but also less noise, it might be better overall. (And if we can't work out how to get more contrarians, this might be a useful suggestion anyway.)
Sarcasm is hard to respond to, because I don't know what your actual position is other than "not-that".
I seriously doubt that was sarcasm.
Mm, on second reading I think you're right. "Vastly higher quality than anything we would be likely to get from the best contrarians we can find" comes across to me as having too many superlatives to be meant seriously. But "not-sarcastic" fits my model of lukeprog better.
(I was also influenced by it being at -1 when I replied. There's probably a lesson in contrarianism to be taken from that...)
Keep in mind that we're talking about Carl Shulman. If you know the guy it's pretty obvious that Lukeprog was dead serious.
(FWIW Vassar, Carl, and Rayhawk (in ascending order of apparent neuroticism) are traditionally most associated with constructing steel men. (Or as I think Vassar put it, "steel men, adamantium men, magnetic monopolium men", respectively.))
To generalize, this suggests re-purposing existing LWers to the role of contrarians, rather than looking for new people.
Or designing a mechanism or environment that makes it easier for existent LW contrarians to express their ideas.
(My personal experience is that trying to defend a contrarian position on LW results in a lot of personal cheap shots, unnecessarily-aggressively-phrased counter-affirmations, or needless re-affirmations of the LW consensus. (E.g., I remember one LWer said he was trying to "tar and feather [me] with low-status associations". He was probably exaggerating, but still.) This stresses me out a lot and causes me to make errors in presentation and communication, and needlessly causes me to become adversarial. Now when discussing contrarian topics I start out adversarial in anticipation of personal cheap shots et cetera. Most of the onus is on me, but still, I think higher general standards or some sideways change in the epistemic environment could make constructive contrarianism a less stressful role for LWers to take up.)
Require X amount of karma to pay Y amount for an anonymous comment?
Require X amount of karma to pay for Y amount of karma added to your post so that it's more likely to be seen, or to counteract downvotes?
I completely disagree. The optimal number of contrarians is 0.
What is the optimal number of people who are intelligent but, on reflection, don't agree with the LessWrong consensus?
Give me your answer to that question before I answer.
I'd guess that somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of the current active LessWrong community should be willing to intelligently disagree with consensus - if our goal is to improve our theories of how society does and should work.
I completely disagree.
Is there an answer (other than zero), that you wouldn't completely disagree with? If not, why did you ask me for my number first?
FWIW, I don't think "willingness to intelligently disagree with consensus" = contrarian. Disagreeing for the simple purpose of disagreeing is pointless.
I would disagree with you if you said zero too.
If this chain of posts is a joke, I don't think I get it. If it's not, I am mildly amused.
I think it's a meta-joke. Incorrect is a hyper-contrarian arguing about how many contrarians there should be :)
Not only that, but in an uninformative and confrontational manner, posing the problem of how to respond to generate better contrarianism.
I'm not joking, but it's pretty clear Incorrect is. I'm not amused, but the joke is basically at my expense, so that's not very good evidence of whether Incorrect was actually amusing.
Speaking as one who often upvotes bad jokes...
No.
TimS is encouraging people to be more contrarian, so Incorrect is disagreeing with him.
contrarian != willing to intelligently disagree with consensus
Is this the right room for an argument?
Edit: I seemed to have failed my spot test to notice that some else in the thread had aready linked to the same video.
It's unlikely that the "LW mainstream position" is currently right about all of its weird beliefs, though I wouldn't be surprised if we're right to take each of the ideas more seriously than the normal mainstream does.
EDIT: never mind, I didn't catch that you were doing this.
One relevant dynamic is the following: if an idea is considered "absurd" to the mainstream, there will be very few people who take the idea seriously yet disagree with it. Social pressure forces polarization: if you're going to disagree with it, you might as well agree with all your normal friends that the idea is kooky.
Thus it's especially hard to find good contrarians for a forum that takes several "absurd" positions.
There's one tactic that's worked well to get LW posts on neglected topics: having a competition for the best post on a subject. A $100 prize resulted in some excellent posts on efficient charity, and the Quantified Health Prize (substantially more money) led to some good analyses of the data on dietary supplementation.
What about having a contest for the best contrarian post on topic X? Personally, I'd chip in a few bucks for a good contrarian post on intelligence explosion, the mathematical universe, the expected value of x-rationality, and other topics.
(I had this idea after reading this comment, and now that I think of it I'm reminded of ciphergoth's survey of anti-cryonics writing as well.)
Stream of consciousness. Judge me that ye may be judged. If you judge it by first-level Less Wrong standards, it should be downvoted (vague unjustifiied assertions, thoughtlessly rude), but maybe the information is useful. I look first for the heavily downvoted posts and enjoy the responses to them best.
I found the discussion on dietary supplementation interesting, in your link and elsewhere. As I recall, the tendency was for the responses (not entrants, but peoples comments around town) to be both crazy and stupid (with many exceptions, e.g., Yvain, Xacharaiah). I recall another thread on the topic where the correct comment ("careful!") was downvoted and its obvious explanation ("evolution works!") offered afterward was upvoted. Since I detected no secondary reasons for this, it was interesting in implying Less Wrongians did not see the obvious. Low certainties attached since I know I know nothing about this place. I'm deliberately being vague.
In general, Less Wrongians strike me as a group of people of impaired instrumental rationality who are working to overcome it. Give or take, most of you seem to be smarter than average but also less trustworthy, less able to exhibit strong commitments, etc. Probably this has been written somewhere hereabouts, but a lot of irrationalities are hard to overcome local optima; have you really gone far enough onto the other side? Incidentally, that could be a definition for x-rationality (if never actually done): Actually epistemically rational enough that it's instrumentally useful. Probably a brutally hard threshold to achieve and seems untrue of here, as I believe I've seen threads comment.
I was curious about the background of the people offering lessons at the rationality bootcamp, and saw some blog entry by one of them against, oh, being conservative in outlook (re: risk aversion). It was incredibly stupid; I mean, almost exclusively circular reasoning. You obviously deviate from the norm in your risk aversion. You're not obviously more successful than the norm (or are you? perhaps I'm mistaken). Maybe it's just a tough row to hoe, but that's the real task.
Personal comment: I realize Dmitry has been criticized a bit elsewhere and the voting trend doesn't support generalization to the community at large, but my conversation with him illustrates what I generally believe about this place. I knew more than he did. I said enough that he should realize this. He didn't realize it and shoehorned his response into a boring framework. I had specific advice to give, which I didn't get to, and realized I was reluctant to give (most Less Wrong stuff seems weak to me).
A whole lot of Less Wrong seems to be going for less detail, less knowledge, more use of frameworks of universal applicability and little precision. The sequences seem similar to me: Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can't. And always too long. I've read about four paragraphs of them in total. The quality of conversation here is high for a blog, of course, but low for a good academic setting. Some of the mild sneering at academics around here sounds ridiculous (an AI researcher believes in God). AI's a weak field. All round, papers don't quite capture any field and are often way way behind what people roughly feel.
Real question: Do you want me here?
I like you guys. I agree with you philosophically. I have nothing much to offer unless I put some effort into it (e.g., actually read what people write, etc). No confusion: You should be downvoting posts like this in general. You might want to make an exception 'cause it's worth hearing a particular rambling mindset once. My effort is better spent elsewhere (I can't imagine you'd disagree). I can't see anything that can be offered to me. I feel like I was more rational at age 7 than you are now (I wrote a pro and con list for castrating myself for the longevity and potential continuity of personality gains; e.g., maintaining the me of 7). A million other things. I'm working on real problems in other areas now.
I like your style of writing. Though: too many ideas, difficult to rate and respond.
Karma always has a random component. Karma of one comment is not significant. Karma of 10 comments shows a trend. I have once received a negative karma for a comment showing an obvious error in reasoning of others; but it only happened once in maybe hundred comments, so I don't make a drama of it. But yeah, it might be painful if that happened to someone's first comment on LW.
Instrumental rationality is a known problem of intelligent people. My worst experience was Mensa: huge signalling, almost nothing ever done; and if something is done, it's usually always done by the same two or three people, who could just as well have it done on their own. Compared with that, people at LW are relatively high in instrumental rationality -- they have a working website, they write good articles, they do research, they organize meetups and seminars. But yes, we could do a lot better. Instead of going meta, people could focus and write about things they care about. Not doing this on a web discussion is probably a symptom of not doing it in the real life.
Yes, being convinced of one's own rationality can lead to overconfidence. I don't know a cure. Perhaps repeated exposure to disagreement of other rational people will eventually move one to update. Another reason for people focusing on what they are good at -- providing more evidence for their rationalist friends.
Re: last three paragraphs -- the choice to stay or leave is on you. Don't participate in the discussions you consider worthless, write something about the real things you work on. (And perhaps I should do the same.) But this is not a new idea -- we have regular threads "what are you working on" here.
This. A thousand times this. As a lawyer, LessWrong pattern matches with people outside a complicated field who are convinced that those in the fields are idiots because observers think that "the field is not that complicated."
That said, "Boring where I can judge meaning, meaningless where I can't." is an unfair criticism. Lots of really excellent ideas seem boring if you had already internalized the core ideas.
??? Seriously?
Perhaps we have this backwards?
If there is something intrinsically valuable about controversy (and I'm not really sure that there is, but I'm willing to accept the premise for the sake of discussion), and we're not getting the optimal level of controversy on the topics we normally discuss (again, not sure I agree, but stipulated), then perhaps what we should be doing is not looking for "more and better contrarians" who will disagree with us on the stuff we have consensus on, but rather starting to discuss more difficult topics where there is less consensus.
One problem is, of course, that some of us are already worried that LW is too weird-sounding and not sufficiently palatable to the mainstream, for example, and would probably be made uncomfortable if we explore more controversial stuff... it would feel too much like going to school in a clown suit. And moving from areas of strength to areas of weakness is always a little scary, and some of us will resist the transition simply for that reason. And many more.
Still, if you can make a case for the value of controversy, you might find enough of us convinced by that case to make that transition.
Here's a case for the value of controversy.
In other words, even if you believe that each item of LessWrong consensus is almost certain to be correct, you should still be doubtful that every item of LessWrong consensus is likely to be correct. And if there are significant errors, then how else will they be found and publicized other than via a controversial discussion?
I agree that there are errors in the "LW consensus."
I agree that a cost-effective mechanism for identifying those errors would be a valuable thing.
By your estimation, how many controversial discussions have occurred on LW in the last year?
How many of them have contributed to identifying any of those errors?
Those are both good questions (as is the implicit point about cost-effectiveness or lack thereof); I'm afraid I'm not a heavy enough reader here to quickly give accurate answers.
I'm not looking to you for accurate answers, I'm trying to understand the model you're operating on.
If you tell me you think there have been a few controversial (in the sense you describe above) discussions and you think they've contributed to identifying errors, then it makes sense to me that you think having more such discussions is valuable. I may disagree, but it's clear to me what we're disagreeing about.
If you tell me you don't think we've had any such discussions, I can sort of understanding you believing that they would be valuable if we had them, but I would also conclude I don't quite know what sorts of discussions you're talking about.
If you tell me you think we've had a few such discussions but they haven't contributed anything, then I would be very confused and want to revisit my understanding of why you believe what you believe.
Etc.
See Wei Dai's comment here—he doesn't value controversy qua controversy.
Mm.
Fair enough.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not convinced that the goal of having correct beliefs on the topics addressed in the Sequences will be cost-effectively approached by introducing new contrarians to LW.
It would likely be more cost-effective to identify some thinkers we collectively esteem and hire them to perform a "peer review" on those topics.
That said, I'm not sure I see what the point of that would be either, since it's not like EY is going to edit the Sequences regardless of what the reviewers say.
It might be even more cost-effective to hire reviewers for his book before he publishes it.
I would prefer an increase in 'question' (problem) posts, as opposed to 'statement' (solution) posts, contrarian or no.
Most of the machine intelligence folk don't seem to be on "your" side. I think they see you as potential competitors who don't share their values.
I tend to be more sympathetic to their position than yours. In particular I don't seem to share your values, and don't much like your PR - or your "end of the world" propaganda. I think that developing in secret is a pretty dubious plan - and that the precautionary principle sucks
Probably the best thing about you is that you have Eliezer on your side - and he's a smart cookie. However, that aspect also appears to have its downsides.
It took me much longer than it should have to mentally move you from the "troll" category to the "contrarian" one. That's my fault, but it makes for an interesting case study:
I quickly got irritated that you made the same criticisms again and again, without acknowledging the points people had argued against you each time. To a reader who disagrees with you, that style looks like the work of a troll or crank; to a reader who agrees with you, it's the best that you can do when arguing against someone more eloquent, with a bigger platform, who's gone wrong at some key step.
It should be noted that I don't instinctively think any more highly of contrarians who constantly change their line of attack; it seems to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" tribal response.
The way I changed my mind was that you made an incisive comment about something that wasn't part of your big disagreement with the Less Wrong community, and I was forced to update. For any would-be respected contrarians out there, this might be a good tactic to circumvent our natural impulse towards closing ranks.
I still find it tricky to distinguish if timtyler realizes what he's saying is going to be misinterpreted but just doesn't care (e.g. doesn't want to cave into the general resource-intensive norm of rephrasing things so as not to set off politics detectors), or if he doesn't realize what he's saying is going to be misinterpreted. E.g. he makes a lot of descriptive claims that look suspiciously like political claims and thus gets downvoted even when upon being queried he says they were intended purely as descriptive claims. I've started to think he generally just doesn't notice when he's making claims that could easily be interpreted as unnecessarily political.
Politics? This might, perhaps, be to do with the whole plan of unilaterally taking over the world? If so, that is a plan with a few politicical implications, and maybe it's hard to discuss it while avoiding seeming political.
Yes, and because the Eliezerian doom/world-takeover position is somewhat marginalized by the mainstream, people around here are quick to assume that stating simple facts or predictions about it, unless the facts are implicitly in favor of the marginalized position, is instead implicitly a vote in favor of further marginalization, and thus readers react politically even to simple observations or predictions. E.g., your anti-doom predictions are taken as a political move with the intent of further marginalizing the fund-us-to-help-fight-doom political position, even in the absence of explicit evidence that that's your intent, and so people downvote you. That's my model anyway.
Of course, from my point of view, the "doom exaggeration" looks like a crude funding move based on exploiting people by using superstimulii - or, at best, a source of low-relevance noise from a bunch of self-selected doom enthusiasts who have clubbed together.
You do have a valid point about my intentions. I derive some value from the existence of the SI, but the overall effect seems to be negative. I'm not on "your side". I think "your side" currently sucks - and I don't see much sign of reform. I plan to join another group.
Me too. Probably the Catholics.
Is there a Dominican community blog I should watch? Also, would you surreptitiously palm some small dry ice granules right before you dip your fingers in the water during confirmation? I've always wanted to see that.
I know basically nothing about modern Catholics, actually, which is a big reason why I haven't yet converted. E.g. I have serious doubts about the goodness of the Second Vatican Council. If the Devil has seriously tainted the temporal Church then I want no part in it.
That would be really cool. But I think God would be displeased. ...I'm not sure about that, I'll ask Him. (FWIW I rather doubt He'll give an unambiguous answer.)
If you had to specify a historical year in which Catholicism seems most correct to you which would it be?
There is no such thing as "modern Catholics". There are a number of subgroups, but I don't know enough to be usefully more specific.
That doesn't sound great! Was I right? If you think there's a case where I should have updated - but didn't - perhaps it can be revisited? Of course, I don't mean to put pressure on you to trawl through my comments - but it would be nice for me to know if you have any specific cases in mind.
I couldn't find them in a quick search, but the gist of the argument that got me frustrated was a cluster of arguments that you've stated a lot but never written up at length. Let me summarize roughly:
All new technological developments are just continuations of evolution; there are no relevant differences between evolution of genes, memes, corporations, etc; and therefore the Singularity couldn't be an existential crisis, just a faster continuation of evolution.
(Apologies if I've mangled it.) It seemed to me that every time a relevant topic was mentioned, back in the days of the Sequences, you merely stated one of these opinions rather than argued for it. But again, it's difficult for me to recognize good arguments when I disagree with their conclusions.
This could be rephrased more positively :D
If someone has something they may well be right about, and you don't learn it, that's a problem. Or if they make an argument that you know is wrong from parallel lines of evidence but can't say why it's wrong, that's a slightly smaller problem. And it's a problem with you, not with them. This is a general principle of disagreement. This post is the charge that we are bad at learning from people.
Hmm. Or maybe that's not right. We could be learning from them (on average), but still driving them away because what seemed like constructive argument from one side didn't from the other. In which case, that's fine and you shouldn't listen to this comment :P
Or still driving them away because the comment stream petered out before people got around to expressing their changed viewpoint and the contrarian left because he never realized he was having an impact. The post and comment format isn't really very good for a serious back-and-forth discussion. Especially when posts are so briefly on the front page, note that this is another good reason for getting meet-up announcements OFF of the discussion page.
Some advice for wannabe contrarians and trolls, here. (Muflax seems to be in the middle of re-designing his blog so the link might not be 100% stable.)
We need a handy way of saying "Yes I understand the standard arguments for P but I still think it's worth your while considering this argument for ¬P rather than just telling me the standard arguments for P."
Unfortunately it may be that the only credible signal of this is to first outline the standard arguments for P.
Agreed. In my experience this problem of standard-argument-affirming shows up a lot during debates about uFAI risks. If I try to suggest some non-obvious argument against the Eliezerian position then I tend to mostly get re-assertions or re-phrasings of the standard Eliezerian arguments, which is distracting and a tad insulting. It seems some people identify me as a mainstream-view-loving enemy who is trying to unfairly marginalize the Eliezerian position, and thus don't bother to carefully check if my argument might be reasonable on its own terms.
In the last few months I've been averaging like 5 to 10 karma on my anti-Eliezerian AI risk arguments, and I think that's because I've expressed them more clearly and redundantly. But they're the same arguments that were getting downvoted to -5 or so back a year or two ago when I wasn't taking special care not to trigger local immune responses. (Weirdly, even saying that I'd spent a year or so with the Visiting Fellows talking to a lot of SingInst people who didn't think I was clearly stupid or insane didn't dissuade people from thinking I was clearly mistaken about basic SingInst arguments. I still don't really understand that... maybe I was interpreted as making an unjustified claim to authority that shouldn't be taken as evidence, or something.)
Any extreme minority position would take a long time to win converts. People are generally wrong because they have bad concepts, not because they have clear concepts, but mistakenly thought 2+2=5.
It takes a while to penetrate poor concepts, and the people with poor concepts have to be willing to put in the effort to justify their argument, and not just take it as a given that is up to someone else to refute their nonsense, because you can't refute gibberish. Most people here are intellectually confident. Add to that the consensus of the group, and who is going to expend the effort to honestly defend and justify the consensus?
On the contrarian side, the contrarian is also probably intellectually confident. Unless he finds a productive engagement, he'll eventually just shrug and move on. I've done as much. On one thread, I found the views about clinical trial data thoroughly wrongheaded. I was downvoted a lot, but persisted, being the ornery coot that I am. But eventually, I move on, because I have a day job, and other things to do.
And there's something about the "comments after blog post" format that isn't conducive to sustained debate for me. Maybe because it's one long page, it feels inappropriate to have 20 back and forths, while a serious discussion probably would require that.
I think this is the best comment, at least the one that best captures my own views, on this thread.
Another way of looking at the problem expressed in buybuydandavis's first two paragraphs is that most people are so busy signalling, rather than thinking, that their concepts are usually "not even wrong".
I disagree with quite a lot of the LW consensus, but I haven't really expressed my criticisms in the few comments I've made. I differ substantially from Sequence line on metaethics, reductionism, materialism, epistemology, and even the concept of truth. My views on these things are similar in many respects to those of Hilary Putnam and even Richard Rorty. Those of you familiar with the work of these gentlemen will know how far off the reservation this places me. For those of you who are not familiar with this stuff, I guess it wouldn't be stretch to describe me as a postmodernist.
I initially avoided voicing my disagreements because I suspect that my collection of beliefs is not only regarded as false by this community, but also as a fairly reliable indicator of woolly thinking and a lack of technical ability. I didn't want to get branded right off the bat as someone not worth engaging with. The thought was that I should first establish some degree of credibility within the community by restricting myself to topics where the inferential distance between the average LWer and me is small. I think wannabe contrarians entering into any intellectual community should be encouraged to expend some initial effort on credibility-building by talking about stuff on which they by and large agree with the community. I haven't been following LessWrong for that long, but I gather that there was a time when Will Newsome's comments were a lot more.... orthodox. I'm guessing that fact has a lot to do with the way his criticisms are received now.
Another big reason I avoid talking about my disagreements is that they are sufficiently fundamental that I expect a large amount of pushback. I know I find it very hard to disengage from argument, and I suspect that's also true of a significant proportion of the posters here, so I'm worried that the discussion will be a horrible time suck. I really can't afford that right now. Perhaps at some time in the future, when I have a little more time, I'll write a discussion post detailing some of my objections.
He can still be found on the SingInst about us page.
You do your name justice.
(In case it's not obvious the description is not at all currently accurate. I am currently in the process of doing nothing. At some point I firmly decided that doing things is evil, so I try not to do things anymore, at least as a stopgap solution till I better understand the relevant motivational dynamics and moral philosophy. I still talk to people sometimes though, obviously, but to some extent I feel guilty about that too.)
I still act socially as a Christian in much of my social life so in a certain (not epistemically literal) sense hearing this from 'another believer' strikes me as sacrilege. The Parable of the Talents has a clear point to make on this subject! You are defying His will and teachings.
If only it were so easy to tell righteous exploration from liberal folly. But anyway, it's just a stopgap solution. Likely preparation for a sojourn in the desert, and after that, God knows.
40 days and 40 nights?
I don't yet understand the (Kabbalistic?) significance of the number 40. Haven't looked into it. Maybe if I figured it out then I'd find 40 days, 40 nights uniquely appealing.
Worked for Elijah, Moses and Jesus. (I'd recommend eating food though - or at least drink gatorade.)
What do you think about Kabbalah?
40 is sometimes used, in the Torah, to indicate a general large quantity - according to Google. It also has associations with purification and/or wisdom, according to my interpretation of the various places it appears in the Bible as a whole. (There are a lot of them.)
Would it help you behave more morally by your lights if nobody replied to you?
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.
A perfect example of the problem, I guess.
Many pro-LW-mainstream arguments are weak if you have significantly different priors. People with minority view quickly learn the difference in priors and learn to express their views less often and defend them less.
I also consider FOOM-as-described-on-LW quite improbable and the writings of Eliezer on the topic simply raise a few red flags; I see that it is a popular position here, but most people don't find it worth the effort to fight mainstream.
There are still many topics on LW where no relevant values or priors are parts of LW majority's collective identity and I get some entertainment and information form reading these discussions and participating in them. There are also topics close to things that are accessible to science with all its rigidity (but also stability) compared to Bayesian inference. These are very informative too.
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).
Me too:
I used to be very active on Less Wrong, posting one or two comments every day, and a large fraction of my comments (especially at first) expressed disagreement with the consensus. I very much enjoyed the training in arguing more effectively (I wanted to learn to be more comfortable with confrontation) and I even more enjoyed assimilating the new ideas and perspectives of Less Wrong that I came to agree with.
But after a long while (about two years), I got really, really bored. I visit from time to time just to confirm that, yes, indeed, there is nothing of interest for me here. Well, I'm sure that's no big deal: people have different interests and they are free to come and go.
This is the first post that has interested me in a while, because it gives me a reason to analyze why I find Less Wrong so boring. I would consider myself the type of "reasonable contrarian" the author of this post seems to be looking for -- I am motivated to argue if I disagree, and have the correct attitude in that I'm quite willing to think counter-arguments through and change my position if I disagree. If only, alas, I disagreed about anything.
On all the topics that I used to enjoy being contrary about, I've either been assimilated into Less Wrong (for example, I'm no longer a theist) or I have identified that either (a) the reason for the difference in opinion was a difference in values or (b) the argument in question had no immediate material meaning, and, so arguing about either was completely pointless. My disinterest in cryonics is an example of (a), and belief or disbelief in many worlds is an example of (b).
I do wish Less Wrong was more interesting, because I used to enjoy spending time here. I realize this is a completely self-centered perspective, because presumably many do continue to find Less Wrong entertaining. But I want to learn things, and be challenged and stretched as much possible, and now that I'm already atheist that challenge isn't there. I'd like to understand how the "world works" and now that I've got materialism under my belt, what's next? I wish Less Wrong would try and tackle taboo topics like politics, because this an area where I observe I'm completely clueless. On the other hand, I also understand that these questions are probably just too difficult to tackle, and such a conversation would have a large probability of being fruitless.
Still, I agree with prase, currently the top comment, that Less Wrong topics tend to be too narrow. My secondary criticism would be that for me (just my opinion) the posts are kind of bland. Maybe people are too reasonable (!?), but there doesn't seem to be anything to argue with.
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.
Idea- Using Contrary Opinions as a Group Rationality Exercise
Sometimes when I'm discussing issues one-on-one with someone of a different opinion, I will find myself treating arguments as soldiers (I am improving on catching myself in this, I think.). I can also have difficulties verbalizing what is wrong with an argument when put on the spot.
Maybe we can use "Devil's Advocating" posts as a group exercise in rationality. Someone can read or summarize a specific opposing viewpoint that they do not necessarily agree with (maybe subjectivism, or Kuhn's scientific revolutions). They could hopefully even get completely new material, in order to provide practice in a field we haven't discussed.
They will present the strongest summary they can in a post, writing as if they fully supported the idea. The tag [Devil's Advocating] can be used to show that this is what they are doing.
One comment thread can be devoted to finding arguments that the viewpoint covers strongly. (i.e. maybe subjectivism handles a specific question a little better than most other philosophies, or maybe Kuhn's revolutions provide a better explanation of the different types of science that scientists engage in than other science philosophies). This can help us fight our "Soldiers as Arguments" inclinations.
Another comment thread can be devoted to finding specific fallacies in the argument. NOT just "This is silly, <Idea X> is better", but actual "This doesn't work because of <Reason Y>".
Of course, for this to be interesting, it has to be an opposing idea that hasn't been discussed to death. For example, I know in history there are all sorts of competing theories, some of which work better than others. I bet other fields are the same.
This reminds me of days in +x debate, where the topic was set in advance, and you were assigned to oppose or affirm each round. Learning to find persuasive arguments for ideas you actually support is not an intuitive skill, but certainly one that can be learned with practice. I, for one, would greatly enjoy +x debate over issues in the less wrong community.
I think the kind of people you're looking for are rare in general, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are rare on LW.
That said, there's room for improvement. The karma system only allows for one kind of vote. It could be more like Slashdot and allow for tagging of the vote, or better yet allow for up/down voting in several different categories. If a comment is IMO well worded, clear, logical, and dead wrong, then it's probably worth reading, but not worth believing. Right now all I can do is vote it up or down. I'd like to be able to vote for clarity and against content at the same time. And as long as I'm wishing, I'd also like to be able to vote just to vote, so we can have user generated polls without needing a karma dump. And humor - that deserves it's own category. Better feedback, better results. Or at least, so I believe, never having had better feedback.
Conversely, we could establish the convention of downvoting stuff we consider valueless and upvoting stuff we consider valuable, and leave right and wrong out of it except insofar as voters value right things and antivalue wrong things. If we did that, we'd understand that highly upvoted comments were considered valuable, but not necessarily agreed with.
Oh, wait.
Sure, we could also create a mechanism whereby people could indicate whether they agreed with it (also whether they thought it was well-worded, clear, logical, funny, properly spelled, whether it rhymed, and various other attributes), but before doing that it's worth asking what the benefit of that would be.
I understand wanting to facilitate finding valuable comments and hiding valueless ones, but for the other stuff I'd like to see the benefits articulated, not just labelled "better".
The idea is to make it possible to say (by voting) "even though I think you're wrong, I'd like to hear more". The problem IMO with the current system is that the people who vote "I think that's wrong" drown out the people who vote "I think that's interesting". It may be that isn't supposed to happen, but that seems to be what does happen. Would a "rhymes" button make sense? Sure - if you wanted to encourage rhyming posts. The GP wants to encourage contrarians and skeptics, so "like/dislike" and "agree/disagree" seemed appropriate. I haven't seen many of them on LW, but on other boards I really wish there was a "WTF? didn't understand your post" button, as I would press that one quite a bit. What buttons are best is a subject unto itself, but probably not worth discussing unless the basic concept is possible and worthwhile.
Conversely, the impetus to make the basic concept possible might increase if someone made a compelling case for what value it would provide.
Incidentally, I'm not suggesting that people should upvote/downvote based on "interesting" rather than "true".
I'm suggesting people should upvote/downvote based on "want more like this."
That means if I see a true comment, and I want to see more true comments, I upvote it because it's true.
If I see a well-written comment, and I want to see more well-written comments, I upvote it because it's well-written.
If I see a rhyming comment, and I want to see more rhyming comments, I upvote it because it rhymes.
Etc.
Being able to tag a vote to indicate what attribute(s) I wanted more or less of would admittedly be clearer in ambiguous cases... I do sometimes find myself staring at a downvote wondering what the reason for it was.
That said, I'm not sure it would actually add much value.
"Even though I think you're wrong, I'd like to hear more" strikes me as better expressed as a comment rather than a vote.
That way, you can explain what you want to hear more about.
I'd much rather get a reply than a vote.
But presumably there's a reason for the current system rather than the arguably simpler method of not having up/down buttons.