Apprentice comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - LessWrong

147 Post author: Yvain 13 September 2010 09:36PM

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Comment author: Apprentice 14 September 2010 12:04:03AM *  15 points [-]

A while back the "Steveosphere" had a list of items for which "the masses display more common sense than the smarties do". These suggest that they think they have located Yvain-clusters of the following type:

  1. Troglodyte position.
  2. Liberal position.
  3. Troglodyte position held for sophisticated reasons.
Comment author: AlexanderRM 25 March 2015 05:47:30AM 1 point [-]

...many of those questions are rather odd. I went in expecting things like "are the tides controlled by the oceans", questions phrased in a way that sounds stupid but are actually correct (or the "is it scientific to say"), which would have shown that deliberately avoiding stupid statements can lead smart people to make incorrect statements.

And some, like "Genes play a major role in determining personality." and "Things for blacks in the US have improved over time.", fall into that category. I particularly liked "Whites are hurt by affirmative action policies that favor blacks". However, many of the questions outright contain "should" statements where you actually cannot say that the answers the "smarties" gave were factually incorrect, because they require getting into our goals and morality, or at least talking about very complicated things from that angle.