13 ms·

Intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarians

188 points by j_baker 16y ago

_delirium 16y ago
It's an interesting problem, because there is some benefit in intellectual areas to not over-signalling "intelligence", imo. Nobody likes the hipster, but nobody really likes the insecure mid-level intellectual who goes out of his way to speak like a thesaurus, either (the intellectual equivalent of buying too much jewelry). Seems tricky to find exactly the right balance!
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  I always think the best speakers are those who use clear, concise, and easily understood language. There is no sense in trying to confuse your audience or show off how obscure your vocabulary is. That is why I always preferred Hemingway or Steinbeck to Fitzgerald or Joyce.
  - celoyd 16y ago
    I think that’s good as a rule, but I’m not sure it holds for cases like Joyce. If you want to write a book that has to do with how experience is translated into language and vice-versa, transparent language might not be best. Sometimes confusion can be a very deliberate and controlled effect, like in David Foster Wallace (who’s also on the front page today). Just like Picasso could draw a realistic portrait when he wanted, Joyce sometimes used very simple and conservative prose. But I would agree that most people who use long words (like most people who use more than one perspective per painting) shouldn’t.
    - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
      I completely agree, but I meant it more as an example that sometimes people can be obscure to appear intelligent when really it may just be concealing the fact that they have nothing important to say. I am not trying to slight Fitzgerald or Joyce, I like both of them as authors, but when you meet people, at say a dinner party, who try to speak similar to Joyce or Fitzgerald's style of writing, it comes off as pretentious and like it is serving some other motive--mainly that they want to say they're better than you.
    - cparedes 16y ago
      If we want to be a bit more precise with our thoughts, then we sometimes have to break out the longer words for instant clarity (given a dictionary, that is.) Technical fields need jargon in order to communicate a lot of metaphors / concepts in the least amount of paper and time as possible. But I agree with lotusleaf1987: sometimes, I just want to yell, "JUST SPIT IT OUT IN PLAIN LANGUAGE." I think it's easy for someone to fall into the trap of getting too enthralled with the jargon and not understand the concept behind it, so they can reformulate the concept into a more understandable metaphor...
      - celoyd 16y ago
        Sure. I wasn’t really thinking about technical writing. It’s good to remember that people like Einstein and Feynman could happily explain their work in very simple terms.
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apu 16y ago
What's with the weird misspellings/typos all over the place? Like 'ey' for 'he', or 'eir' for 'their'?
- j_baker 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
  - anurag 16y ago
    Isn't usage of Spivak pronouns itself a form of meta-contrarianism? (gender-biased / gender-neutral / Spivak)
    - deleted 16y ago
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    - gort 16y ago
      The author isn't suggesting that something being meta-contrarian actually makes it wrong...
    - khafra 16y ago
      To fit the pattern, it would have to swing back the other direction, not go further in the same direction. For example: gender-biased / spivak / conspicuously using traditional pronouns in a context where they're assumed to be gender neutral.
  - saturn 16y ago
    What's wrong with "it"? It's gender neutral. Life neutral, even, can't get more neutral than that.
narrator 16y ago
Well if you want to be a uber-meta-contrarian you learn the art and do your own research. Otherwise you're just repeating what someone else said who either did their own research, or pretended to in order support some pre-determined conclusion.
napierzaza 16y ago
This is what a lot of HN posts are about. Or is this exactly what HN posts are NOT about? I think so.
narkee 16y ago
Or you stop defining your beliefs based on the beliefs of others. Problem solved.
sev 16y ago
"But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?" I think that's a wrong question to ask, because "hipsters" aren't being deliberately uncool. A better question would be: "why is not following what the mainstream does cooler than following it?" And the answer to that is simpler: because it shows a sense of leadership.
rdtsc 16y ago
I wonder how conscious is this process? Do people really tell themselves things like "aha, I'll show them that I am rich buying something I don't need that's expensive" or does the desire to buy something extravagant and expensive just pop into their head out of nowhere and they are just compelled to do it. Also, what is the strength of the desire to signal among all groups? Perhaps a poor person has a stronger desire to signal that they are rich than a rich person to signal that they are not poor. I think that's the second axis -- how much one signals. If it is conscious, where does the refusal to signal fall into? Like the author mentions, it would seem that an intellectually honest person should rationally analyze themselves, and steer clear of this kind of trap.
- Herring 16y ago
  I've read only snippets of their articles on signalling, but I think it's mainly issues of self & identity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
- nkurz 16y ago
  Different levels of behaviour are associated with different levels of consciousness. For your example of conspicuous consumption, all the crosses seem possible. In my social circles, I'd guess that in general the most common are to "buy unconsciously" and to "avoid consciously". It would probably depend on your specific example. I wouldn't think of it as a trap, though. It's more of a situational awareness. People will react differently based on the signals you send. Is the trap to signal consciously or unconsciously? Because consciously not signalling might turn out to be the trap to avoid. But then again, so might any of the three other combinations
- timinman 16y ago
  I read somewhere that hipsters almost universally deny being hipsters.
- sethg 16y ago
  I assume it’s a process of “the people I hang out with, who are in my economic class, are all driving BMWs and Lexuses, and I feel silly parking my Subaru next to their cars”.
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ibejoeb 16y ago
>In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the same clothes uncool people wear. Hipsters are at the top of the fashion now? This is why I wear suits.
- _delirium 16y ago
  But how do we know if you're wearing that suit ironically or not? ;-) http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit,11185/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wea...
metamemetics 16y ago
The underlying assumption of this article every step of the way is that one's underlying motivation for argument, debate, or discussion is to signal social standing I would argue instead that the most intelligent people find it innately enjoyable to talk about ideas. They are motivated by a desire to decrease-uncertainty and clarify-understanding.... they realize social standing is often an illusion and not overly worth worrying about.
- InfinityX0 16y ago
  I think Hacker News is strong supporting evidence of your point. There is some ability to display/leverage social standing here, but by and large, it is a platform of anonymous commenters commenting simply for the pleasure of discussion. That, and anonymously validating our own intelligence through the karma system - but it seems the prior benefit is a larger pull.
  - timinman 16y ago
    The karma system has got to be a huge magnet for this kind of discussion.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      There's even a High Score List: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
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      - InfinityX0 16y ago
        I don't think the High Score List really matters - it helps the 1% (estimation) percent of the community that's there, but for the rest of us, it's like trying to achieve the Home Run Record - it's largely a pointless metric. If there was something like "who received the most karma in the last week", then there would be cause for concern/thought that the community would be hurt by such a list.
nkurz 16y ago
"Meta-contrarianism" is a good phrase to capture this phenomenon. In computers, I associate it with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem and in life, with the joke about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down The part that misses for me is his (my pronoun choice is conscious signalling [double 'l' is too, I suppose {as are the parentheticals}]) emphasis on triads. For me, the key concept is that one never knows which level one is at. There is no absolute "level 1", just the "level n" that you occupy, and "level not n", which is never clearly n - 1 or n + 1. One frequently assumes that those who disagree with you are missing something, but every now and then you have to wonder if they actually one ahead. And it happens often enough that people I think I agree with are actually viewing the situation in a completely foreign way. Are there philosophical movements that deal with these situations? What names would I search for? What should I read?
luciferous 16y ago
Meta-contrarians are just early-adopters of the synthesis stage of a dialectic: "Hegelian dialectic... a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic Anyway, could these be programmer triads/dialectics? * Objects are superior/closures are superior/Scala? * Statically-typed/dynamically-typed/some combo of both * Optimize/generalize/do each as required * Waterfall/Agile/(TDD/BDD?) * Relational/NoSQL/???
- olalonde 16y ago
  Couldn't resist to complete the last one: * Relational/NoSQL/The tool for the job
Confusion 16y ago
If there is any truth in what is argued, then this argument itself can be considered to be a display of intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism. Furthermore, any balanced position/argument could be indicted as 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism'. In that case, this article adds absolutely nothing to your understanding of the world and people's behavior. It's just pretending to show some deep insight, by knitting together platitudes about peoples' behavior in a seemingly novel and intellectual way. Or, to be somewhat less of an 'intellectual hipster meta-...-meta-contrarian' (ain't I (un)cool?): what is argued is way to strong and way to broadly applied. 'Lesswrong' usually worries about the practicality of matters and this, on the one hand, just not an important factor, and on the other hand, irrelevant, even if it was, because you still have to counter the actual arguments that are made. If being an 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian' means taking a balanced position, for instance on - KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically proven genetic differences" - misogyny / women's rights movement / men's rights movement - conservative / liberal / libertarian - don't care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don't give aid to Africa then, by God, let's have more 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's. If it doesn't in practice, for most 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's mean 'taking a balanced position', for whatever reason, then I think it's just an empty denomination.
mambodog 16y ago
So this is why I hate the idea of being expected to always put the toilet seat down. I'm a meta-contrarian. Or am I just a bit of a dick?
redthrowaway 16y ago
There is some truth here, especially in regards to more intelligent people taking a mainstream view that lacks the illusion of nuanced thought. That said, I find it hard to read an article on "intellectual hipsterism" that claims the average IQ of their readers is 145. The page the author links to in support of that claim mentions two giant caveats: First, IQ is a notoriously difficult to measure metric of questionable validity, and second, the scores are self-reported. The reported values range from 120-180. Essentially, the survey suggests that the top half of their readership is in the top 1% of the national population. Even their bottom half is in the top 10%, by their statistics. This suggests a fatal flaw in the survey, and to mention the resulting statistic in such an offhand manner and with no warning to the reader of the problems with it suggests at best laziness, and at worst intellectual dishonesty on the part of the author. I find it hard, therefore, to take their argument at face value. That's not to say it's invalid, merely that the author's conduct does not support its validity.
- fjh 16y ago
  To be fair, there is a footnote pointing out how dubious that claim is.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    Yeah, I read the sentence as tongue-in-cheek humor.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      I think that's a fair analysis. It wasn't how I took it, but I could see that being the author's intent.
- nkurz 16y ago
  I would take it at face value. First, the author is taking for granted that his readers are intelligent enough to realize that self-reported IQ scores are inaccurate, that IQ as measured is not equivalent to any real world intelligence, and that the accuracy of IQ tests is limited once one gets out to the extremes. He links directly to the survey --- what more can he do? Second, I'd guess that the numbers are about right. In the same way that one would be safe assuming that the posters to StackOverflow are probably mostly in the top 1% of programming ability out the entire population of the world, I think it's likely a site dedicated to debating 'meta-contrarianism' might select quite precisely for people who can score well on standardized tests. I'm not a regular reader, but I know enough about the site to suggest a solution: come up with a means of testing your hypothesis, and put up some money to back it. The more direct the better: bet them $1000 that none of the regular posters can show a bona-fide IQ test result higher than 160 (or whatever cutoff you think fairly accounts for the limited accuracy of the test at the extreme). And then report back to us if it was money well spent!
bambax 16y ago
Death actually is great. It's not being meta-contrarian to see that. There was a great speech by Steve Jobs making just this point (and I don't think he was trying to signal his intelligence by saying so?) My death is bad for me (somewhat -- I'm not sure I'd enjoy living forever) but great for the world. I understand that the point of the article absolutely is not to argue about the goodness or badness of death, but isn't it regrettable that the main example they use is so flawed?
- joelmichael 16y ago
  Haha, you're right, you're not being meta-contrarian. You're being contrarian, like the article says.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Nonsense. If people could live forever then they would have less children instinctively. How often is a new Einstein born (or Steve Jobs for that matter)? Was it great that Einstein died? Living forever, or even 10 times longer than we do now would change so many variables there is no way to know what all would be affected.
  - bambax 16y ago
    My point was not to argue about the goodness of death either -- I would have thought it was non-controversial. It's a very good thing Einstein did die, since his most important work was done in the first third of his life, and at the end he was simply denying that quantum mechanics were real. Besides, if death did not exist and "people had less children" (meaning probably zero), Einstein would never have been born! Please (re-)read what Steve Jobs had to say about death: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. From: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
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DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Lesswrong couldn't be more wrong. Or rather, they missed the point entirely. This article reminded me of somebody who is pissed because they lost an argument, so they desperately search around for some kind of label or dirt to throw at the people that beat them. I don't know the history here, but it sure feels that way. To put it simply: people do not take positions simply to counter-signal. Yes, some do, but it's a dangerous game to start labeling huge swaths of your fellow men because of something some may do. They use the example of the old rich and the new rich. The old rich didn't consume, looking down their noses at all the new money folks who spent like banshees. Well maybe there is a certain type of person who just doesn't spend that much. Sam Walton was a billionaire, had a private jet, but he genuinely liked driving around in his pickup truck and flying his older prop airplane. Lots of folks get rich because they don't spend so dang much. That's the problem here: people who know what the hell they are talking about and disagree with you might not be counter-signaling, they may actually be providing balance and some important things for you to consider to the discussion. But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off. This is bullshit. In particular, it's a special form of elitist bullshit that seeks to categorize instead of understand. I wish the lesswrong guys happiness, health, and success, but at some point -- how do I put this nicely? -- you run out of smart things to say. This however does not prevent you from taking up a lot of bytes saying it. (And I speak for myself as much as anybody else) If you're running a blog, sure, spam us with volume. Spray and pray. But if you're looking to provide some kind of consistent quality like with a branded name and multiple authors and such? More editing and reviewing and less self-serving pontificating. You need to be, well, less wrong. :)
- obfuscate 16y ago
  > But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off. I don't see the article doing this, though it could certainly be used that way (http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...), but as warning about a bias you might see in the world or in yourself. I mean, look at the final paragraph: "If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."
zeynel1 16y ago
"the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche." This is true; but there is a more fundamental reason for the newly rich to spend money: it is freedom. People who did not have the right to earn and spend money; when they gain their right to earn and spend money; spend money to assert their freedom. This is why women made spending money a ritual under the name of "shopping." They celebrate their newly found freedom.
noibl 16y ago
There's more to Intellectual positioning than signalling one's intelligence, even if the underlying motives are assumed to be more-or-less base. Hipsterism in general is about being ahead of the curve, not necessarily being the smartest in the room. With Intellectual Hipsterism that means being conversant with the latest ideas, not the most complex ideas. To be up-to-date with the latest radical thinking gives one a privileged position in the discourse because the proportion of the group for whom your input seems novel and interesting becomes greater. This puts the Intellectual Hipster at odds with the mere 'meta-contrarian' because a conservative opinion conservatively argued will never be perceived as novel or interesting. The Intellectually hip[1] will therefore argue in favour of a passé or seemingly discredited position using novel (conbinations of) techniques and references, thereby making the retro idea cool again! --This post sponsored by the IH Institute, Salt Lake City-- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Last I heard the IH Institute was in Portland...
waterhouse 16y ago
To the extent that "contrarian", "meta-contrarian", "meta-meta-contrarian", etc. people spread themselves over the ideological map, it becomes difficult to win favor by adopting a particular viewpoint (e.g. you'll get the contrarians and the meta-meta-meta-contrarians, but you'll piss off the meta-contrarians and slightly alienate the uneducated and the meta-meta-contrarians), and in the proximate future, people will adopt viewpoints more for other reasons--hopefully, because they care about the issue and have given it serious thought. Once the zero-sum game of winning relative favor becomes saturated with fierce competition, new people will be discouraged from entering it, and will spend their effort on more productive things. Also, once you notice a bunch of similar people (meta^n-contrarians) who argue several different sides of an issue, you stop thinking of each side as being, e.g., "traditional country folk vs. college students"; the ideas become dissociated from groups of people, and your opinion of an idea becomes dissociated from your opinion of a group. All you have to go on is the shape of the idea itself, which, I think, is the best way to approach ideas if you're searching for truth. A while ago, someone posted the story "Rent a White Guy", which demonstrated how some clever Japanese companies took advantage of their potential clients' or investors' prejudice towards white CEOs by "renting" a white guy to act like a top executive for the duration of the company's presentation. I thought this was a good thing, because prejudiced investors who found out about tricks like this would have to stop bothering about the issue with future companies, unless they put a fair amount of effort into investigating whether the real CEO was in fact white. This would make things better for naive Japanese companies who didn't even consider the issue and just had their (Japanese) CEO do the presentation; and it would reduce the advantage of companies who did have white CEOs. I think this is all to the good. For people who do real work and just can't be bothered to think about putting on peacock feathers, hardcore hipster fakers are friends and protectors. They make it harder for civilians to tell the difference between a "hip" guy who deliberately dresses unfashionably and a guy who dresses unfashionably because he doesn't think about how he dresses, he thinks about other things. This makes it easier to be a nerd (defined as someone who can't be bothered to do things because they are fashionable). I, for one, thoroughly approve of these people.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Your ideas about the white fake CEO's make sense, but I'm not so sure about the hipsters. The problem there is even though hipsters do dress "unfashionably", they always do it in a way thats different than those who aren't trying at all. In other words, most people don't have trouble distinguishing the two.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
At first I thought the author had inadvertently let some typos slip through, and that slightly annoyed me. Then I realized on further reading that the author was deliberately using third-person pronoun neologisms, and that seriously annoyed me.
- roel_v 16y ago
  Do you mean as in "Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad." ? I've only ever seen it in this post and I figured it were a couple of typos, or a CMS eating 'th' for some reason.
  - sesqu 16y ago
    I assumed it was a parser eating the code point for a dental fricative, added in some misguided attempt to re-introduce ligatures at the data level. Pronoun neologisms never occurred to me. It seems there's real harm in knowing about useless things.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Ok so you got me curious :) since I only know ligatures as, in my simple understanding, two glyphs that are joined together for typographic (visual) purposes. Googling 'dental fricative', that seems to be about phonetic spelling. Would you mind explaining? Is the unicode code point for a 'dental fricative' the same as the bytes of t and h in succession? How does the ligature fit in?
      - sesqu 16y ago
        I can't properly explain something I was wrong about. But yes, "dental fricative" is the "th" sound made by pressing your tongue against your teeth. An example would be the sound in "teeth", written "ti:θ" with the international phonetic alphabet. I assumed someone had read about how, say, "the" was once written "þe" and gone off to restore the usage, as certain people are wont to do. Except that would be overly confusing, so I further assumed that what they found was instead a ligature, a combination of two letters for mostly shorthand and visual purposes, here for the digraph "th". Turns out that there is no such unicode code point - the visually closest thing I can find is ᵺ, and as seen above, it's not even a symbol for the fricative.
drblast 16y ago
I remember this phenomenon from high school English class. The teacher would ask an obvious question, and inevitably someone would reflexively provide the non-obvious wrong answer. I assumed the thought process was this: a teacher hardly ever asks questions with obvious answers, and I rarely understand what's going on, so when I give an answer I'm going to say the opposite of the obvious answer because that will probably be right. It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important. I know there is a better name for this than "meta-contrarian." Unfortunately my education is failing myself here. :-)
- crystalis 16y ago
  You might be thinking of hypercorrection, which does seem to intersect at points with meta-contrarianism.
- maw 16y ago
  It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important. You and myself (and I wonder whom else) accord that this is the penultimate instance that phenomena.
onefortwo 16y ago
When expressing in English my intelligence must be the half that when expression in my native language. And my IQ must be on average. So I will not read a post intended for a CI above 140, I only answer to the comment of drblast guy. If a teacher ask a question with an obvious answer like what is 3 + 3, then I can tell that it depends of the radix use are using, or if you are using 3 as a polynomial in some finite character field, or if you are using some computer language in which the symbols plus is concatenation of strings and the given operation is an error. In any case perhaps any of those answer should bother the teacher, so finally I should say excuse me ...
doki_pen 16y ago
Hmm.. It is fun to come up with a different angle on a common argument, even if you don't seriously believe it. Could it be just nature encouraging us to signal intelligence? Maybe. Does it matter? I know sex is for making babies, but I still enjoy it. I didn't stop when I figured out that it was only enjoyable for the purposes of evolution.
olalonde 16y ago
Conclusion: if you're part of the over-intelligent crowd, resist the temptation of signaling. Let's see if some meta^x-contrarian is going to argue with this :)
crux 16y ago
I found myself completely stymied once that article got to the section about death. I haven't read their other articles on the subject, but they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'. That seems insane to me. Does anybody think that a world without death—or even human death—would be less than hellish? Is it really false wisdom to be glad that living things, or living people, do not infinitely multiply, age, expand, consume resources? Or even false wisdom to try to see the good in the death of an individual? Further, the author takes it as uncontroversial that it is 'wrong' to dwell on the problems of modern industrial society, and hypothesizes that one would only do it in order to signal one's intelligence. They don't think it would be useful—indeed, necessary—for many people to spend a lot of time thinking about the ills of A just because you can conclude that it is a greater good than not-A? Is that really the only way that it works? If I mention that industrial society destroys the environment and alienates the individual, then my argument must be, 'therefore, it is ultimately an evil, and we should scrap it for unelectrified villages.' I like the way the author illustrates the signalling effect in terms of consumption, culture, and even cocktail party conversation; but I'm not sure the mechanism is quite as strong as they think. Another way of putting it is: a lot of the intellectual arguments that the author likes to cast as counter signalling games can just as easily be characterized as successive philosophies and arguments that respond to the facts available to them and the values of the societies in which they arise. You COULD say that very intelligent people who don't want to give aid to Africa are motivated by a need to counter-signal the rather intelligent people who do; or you could say that they are motivated by their own understanding of the best way to increase the economic condition in Africa. If both of those could be said of any person, what value does this psychological model really have?
- endtime 16y ago
  >they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'. Eliezer talked about this at at the Singularity Summit...I can't find the slides, but his subsequent update of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (yes, really) pretty much said the same thing. The relevant part starts around halfway down this chapter: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_... I think this is a pretty common position among the futurist/transhumanist/singularitarian community. The standard inductive argument is basically "I want to be alive tomorrow, and tomorrow I will feel the same way. Therefore, I will never want to die." Edit: Oh, the other point that is often made is that if you grew up on a planet where everyone randomly got hit over the head with a baseball bat every few minutes, there would probably be people who talk about how this is a good thing, because it helps you greater appreciate the bat-free minutes and helps you stay on your toes, etc. But, other things being equal, as an Earthling you probably wouldn't want to go and live on that world. Likewise, if you came form a society where people didn't die, and someone offered you the opportunity to completely cease to exist one day, you probably wouldn't take it.
Tycho 16y ago
It's a good read but this contour-signalling only works when you have two or three levels at play. The question is whether his/her grouping of people into two or three tiers is realistic, useful, or arbitrary. Upper-middle-lower-upper-middle-middle class etc.
m-photonic 16y ago
I can understand the article's placement of libertarianism at the top of the political triad, but at the same time it does seem like (in online arguments at least) people with nuanced positions more often make an effort to distinguish themselves from libertarians than from liberals or conservatives.
- araneae 16y ago
  Yes, those would be the meta-meta-contrarians.
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starpilot 16y ago
Here's an "uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide" triad, about Facebook: what's facebook? / facebook is great! / facebook is beneath me, and I rarely use it (Marco Arment: http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumblrs-marco-arment/ http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumbl... ) So, tech hipsters, you too can join in on the fun.
- rms 16y ago
  / Facebook is beneath me and I can't stop refreshing.

188 points by j_baker 16y ago

It's an interesting problem, because there is some benefit in intellectual areas to not over-signalling "intelligence", imo. Nobody likes the hipster, but nobody really likes the insecure mid-level intellectual who goes out of his way to speak like a thesaurus, either (the intellectual equivalent of buying too much jewelry). Seems tricky to find exactly the right balance!

lotusleaf1987 16y ago
I always think the best speakers are those who use clear, concise, and easily understood language. There is no sense in trying to confuse your audience or show off how obscure your vocabulary is. That is why I always preferred Hemingway or Steinbeck to Fitzgerald or Joyce.
- celoyd 16y ago
  I think that’s good as a rule, but I’m not sure it holds for cases like Joyce. If you want to write a book that has to do with how experience is translated into language and vice-versa, transparent language might not be best. Sometimes confusion can be a very deliberate and controlled effect, like in David Foster Wallace (who’s also on the front page today). Just like Picasso could draw a realistic portrait when he wanted, Joyce sometimes used very simple and conservative prose. But I would agree that most people who use long words (like most people who use more than one perspective per painting) shouldn’t.
  - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
    I completely agree, but I meant it more as an example that sometimes people can be obscure to appear intelligent when really it may just be concealing the fact that they have nothing important to say. I am not trying to slight Fitzgerald or Joyce, I like both of them as authors, but when you meet people, at say a dinner party, who try to speak similar to Joyce or Fitzgerald's style of writing, it comes off as pretentious and like it is serving some other motive--mainly that they want to say they're better than you.
  - cparedes 16y ago
    If we want to be a bit more precise with our thoughts, then we sometimes have to break out the longer words for instant clarity (given a dictionary, that is.) Technical fields need jargon in order to communicate a lot of metaphors / concepts in the least amount of paper and time as possible. But I agree with lotusleaf1987: sometimes, I just want to yell, "JUST SPIT IT OUT IN PLAIN LANGUAGE." I think it's easy for someone to fall into the trap of getting too enthralled with the jargon and not understand the concept behind it, so they can reformulate the concept into a more understandable metaphor...
    - celoyd 16y ago
      Sure. I wasn’t really thinking about technical writing. It’s good to remember that people like Einstein and Feynman could happily explain their work in very simple terms.
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apu 16y ago

What's with the weird misspellings/typos all over the place? Like 'ey' for 'he', or 'eir' for 'their'?

j_baker 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
- anurag 16y ago
  Isn't usage of Spivak pronouns itself a form of meta-contrarianism? (gender-biased / gender-neutral / Spivak)
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - gort 16y ago
    The author isn't suggesting that something being meta-contrarian actually makes it wrong...
  - khafra 16y ago
    To fit the pattern, it would have to swing back the other direction, not go further in the same direction. For example: gender-biased / spivak / conspicuously using traditional pronouns in a context where they're assumed to be gender neutral.
- saturn 16y ago
  What's wrong with "it"? It's gender neutral. Life neutral, even, can't get more neutral than that.

narrator 16y ago

Well if you want to be a uber-meta-contrarian you learn the art and do your own research. Otherwise you're just repeating what someone else said who either did their own research, or pretended to in order support some pre-determined conclusion.

napierzaza 16y ago

This is what a lot of HN posts are about. Or is this exactly what HN posts are NOT about? I think so.

narkee 16y ago

Or you stop defining your beliefs based on the beliefs of others. Problem solved.

sev 16y ago

"But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?" I think that's a wrong question to ask, because "hipsters" aren't being deliberately uncool. A better question would be: "why is not following what the mainstream does cooler than following it?" And the answer to that is simpler: because it shows a sense of leadership.

rdtsc 16y ago

I wonder how conscious is this process? Do people really tell themselves things like "aha, I'll show them that I am rich buying something I don't need that's expensive" or does the desire to buy something extravagant and expensive just pop into their head out of nowhere and they are just compelled to do it. Also, what is the strength of the desire to signal among all groups? Perhaps a poor person has a stronger desire to signal that they are rich than a rich person to signal that they are not poor. I think that's the second axis -- how much one signals. If it is conscious, where does the refusal to signal fall into? Like the author mentions, it would seem that an intellectually honest person should rationally analyze themselves, and steer clear of this kind of trap.

Herring 16y ago
I've read only snippets of their articles on signalling, but I think it's mainly issues of self & identity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences
nkurz 16y ago
Different levels of behaviour are associated with different levels of consciousness. For your example of conspicuous consumption, all the crosses seem possible. In my social circles, I'd guess that in general the most common are to "buy unconsciously" and to "avoid consciously". It would probably depend on your specific example. I wouldn't think of it as a trap, though. It's more of a situational awareness. People will react differently based on the signals you send. Is the trap to signal consciously or unconsciously? Because consciously not signalling might turn out to be the trap to avoid. But then again, so might any of the three other combinations
timinman 16y ago
I read somewhere that hipsters almost universally deny being hipsters.
sethg 16y ago
I assume it’s a process of “the people I hang out with, who are in my economic class, are all driving BMWs and Lexuses, and I feel silly parking my Subaru next to their cars”.

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ibejoeb 16y ago

>In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the same clothes uncool people wear. Hipsters are at the top of the fashion now? This is why I wear suits.

_delirium 16y ago
But how do we know if you're wearing that suit ironically or not? ;-) http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wearing-this-business-suit,11185/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wea...

metamemetics 16y ago

The underlying assumption of this article every step of the way is that one's underlying motivation for argument, debate, or discussion is to signal social standing I would argue instead that the most intelligent people find it innately enjoyable to talk about ideas. They are motivated by a desire to decrease-uncertainty and clarify-understanding.... they realize social standing is often an illusion and not overly worth worrying about.

InfinityX0 16y ago
I think Hacker News is strong supporting evidence of your point. There is some ability to display/leverage social standing here, but by and large, it is a platform of anonymous commenters commenting simply for the pleasure of discussion. That, and anonymously validating our own intelligence through the karma system - but it seems the prior benefit is a larger pull.
- timinman 16y ago
  The karma system has got to be a huge magnet for this kind of discussion.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    There's even a High Score List: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
    - deleted 16y ago
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    - InfinityX0 16y ago
      I don't think the High Score List really matters - it helps the 1% (estimation) percent of the community that's there, but for the rest of us, it's like trying to achieve the Home Run Record - it's largely a pointless metric. If there was something like "who received the most karma in the last week", then there would be cause for concern/thought that the community would be hurt by such a list.

nkurz 16y ago

"Meta-contrarianism" is a good phrase to capture this phenomenon. In computers, I associate it with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem and in life, with the joke about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down The part that misses for me is his (my pronoun choice is conscious signalling [double 'l' is too, I suppose {as are the parentheticals}]) emphasis on triads. For me, the key concept is that one never knows which level one is at. There is no absolute "level 1", just the "level n" that you occupy, and "level not n", which is never clearly n - 1 or n + 1. One frequently assumes that those who disagree with you are missing something, but every now and then you have to wonder if they actually one ahead. And it happens often enough that people I think I agree with are actually viewing the situation in a completely foreign way. Are there philosophical movements that deal with these situations? What names would I search for? What should I read?

luciferous 16y ago

Meta-contrarians are just early-adopters of the synthesis stage of a dialectic: "Hegelian dialectic... a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic Anyway, could these be programmer triads/dialectics? * Objects are superior/closures are superior/Scala? * Statically-typed/dynamically-typed/some combo of both * Optimize/generalize/do each as required * Waterfall/Agile/(TDD/BDD?) * Relational/NoSQL/???

olalonde 16y ago
Couldn't resist to complete the last one: * Relational/NoSQL/The tool for the job

Confusion 16y ago

If there is any truth in what is argued, then this argument itself can be considered to be a display of intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism. Furthermore, any balanced position/argument could be indicted as 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism'. In that case, this article adds absolutely nothing to your understanding of the world and people's behavior. It's just pretending to show some deep insight, by knitting together platitudes about peoples' behavior in a seemingly novel and intellectual way. Or, to be somewhat less of an 'intellectual hipster meta-...-meta-contrarian' (ain't I (un)cool?): what is argued is way to strong and way to broadly applied. 'Lesswrong' usually worries about the practicality of matters and this, on the one hand, just not an important factor, and on the other hand, irrelevant, even if it was, because you still have to counter the actual arguments that are made. If being an 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian' means taking a balanced position, for instance on - KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically proven genetic differences" - misogyny / women's rights movement / men's rights movement - conservative / liberal / libertarian - don't care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don't give aid to Africa then, by God, let's have more 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's. If it doesn't in practice, for most 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's mean 'taking a balanced position', for whatever reason, then I think it's just an empty denomination.

mambodog 16y ago

So this is why I hate the idea of being expected to always put the toilet seat down. I'm a meta-contrarian. Or am I just a bit of a dick?

redthrowaway 16y ago

There is some truth here, especially in regards to more intelligent people taking a mainstream view that lacks the illusion of nuanced thought. That said, I find it hard to read an article on "intellectual hipsterism" that claims the average IQ of their readers is 145. The page the author links to in support of that claim mentions two giant caveats: First, IQ is a notoriously difficult to measure metric of questionable validity, and second, the scores are self-reported. The reported values range from 120-180. Essentially, the survey suggests that the top half of their readership is in the top 1% of the national population. Even their bottom half is in the top 10%, by their statistics. This suggests a fatal flaw in the survey, and to mention the resulting statistic in such an offhand manner and with no warning to the reader of the problems with it suggests at best laziness, and at worst intellectual dishonesty on the part of the author. I find it hard, therefore, to take their argument at face value. That's not to say it's invalid, merely that the author's conduct does not support its validity.

fjh 16y ago
To be fair, there is a footnote pointing out how dubious that claim is.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Yeah, I read the sentence as tongue-in-cheek humor.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    I think that's a fair analysis. It wasn't how I took it, but I could see that being the author's intent.
nkurz 16y ago
I would take it at face value. First, the author is taking for granted that his readers are intelligent enough to realize that self-reported IQ scores are inaccurate, that IQ as measured is not equivalent to any real world intelligence, and that the accuracy of IQ tests is limited once one gets out to the extremes. He links directly to the survey --- what more can he do? Second, I'd guess that the numbers are about right. In the same way that one would be safe assuming that the posters to StackOverflow are probably mostly in the top 1% of programming ability out the entire population of the world, I think it's likely a site dedicated to debating 'meta-contrarianism' might select quite precisely for people who can score well on standardized tests. I'm not a regular reader, but I know enough about the site to suggest a solution: come up with a means of testing your hypothesis, and put up some money to back it. The more direct the better: bet them $1000 that none of the regular posters can show a bona-fide IQ test result higher than 160 (or whatever cutoff you think fairly accounts for the limited accuracy of the test at the extreme). And then report back to us if it was money well spent!

bambax 16y ago

Death actually is great. It's not being meta-contrarian to see that. There was a great speech by Steve Jobs making just this point (and I don't think he was trying to signal his intelligence by saying so?) My death is bad for me (somewhat -- I'm not sure I'd enjoy living forever) but great for the world. I understand that the point of the article absolutely is not to argue about the goodness or badness of death, but isn't it regrettable that the main example they use is so flawed?

joelmichael 16y ago
Haha, you're right, you're not being meta-contrarian. You're being contrarian, like the article says.
loewenskind 16y ago
Nonsense. If people could live forever then they would have less children instinctively. How often is a new Einstein born (or Steve Jobs for that matter)? Was it great that Einstein died? Living forever, or even 10 times longer than we do now would change so many variables there is no way to know what all would be affected.
- bambax 16y ago
  My point was not to argue about the goodness of death either -- I would have thought it was non-controversial. It's a very good thing Einstein did die, since his most important work was done in the first third of his life, and at the end he was simply denying that quantum mechanics were real. Besides, if death did not exist and "people had less children" (meaning probably zero), Einstein would never have been born! Please (re-)read what Steve Jobs had to say about death: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. From: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
  - 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Lesswrong couldn't be more wrong. Or rather, they missed the point entirely. This article reminded me of somebody who is pissed because they lost an argument, so they desperately search around for some kind of label or dirt to throw at the people that beat them. I don't know the history here, but it sure feels that way. To put it simply: people do not take positions simply to counter-signal. Yes, some do, but it's a dangerous game to start labeling huge swaths of your fellow men because of something some may do. They use the example of the old rich and the new rich. The old rich didn't consume, looking down their noses at all the new money folks who spent like banshees. Well maybe there is a certain type of person who just doesn't spend that much. Sam Walton was a billionaire, had a private jet, but he genuinely liked driving around in his pickup truck and flying his older prop airplane. Lots of folks get rich because they don't spend so dang much. That's the problem here: people who know what the hell they are talking about and disagree with you might not be counter-signaling, they may actually be providing balance and some important things for you to consider to the discussion. But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off. This is bullshit. In particular, it's a special form of elitist bullshit that seeks to categorize instead of understand. I wish the lesswrong guys happiness, health, and success, but at some point -- how do I put this nicely? -- you run out of smart things to say. This however does not prevent you from taking up a lot of bytes saying it. (And I speak for myself as much as anybody else) If you're running a blog, sure, spam us with volume. Spray and pray. But if you're looking to provide some kind of consistent quality like with a branded name and multiple authors and such? More editing and reviewing and less self-serving pontificating. You need to be, well, less wrong. :)

obfuscate 16y ago
> But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off. I don't see the article doing this, though it could certainly be used that way (http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...), but as warning about a bias you might see in the world or in yourself. I mean, look at the final paragraph: "If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."

zeynel1 16y ago

"the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche." This is true; but there is a more fundamental reason for the newly rich to spend money: it is freedom. People who did not have the right to earn and spend money; when they gain their right to earn and spend money; spend money to assert their freedom. This is why women made spending money a ritual under the name of "shopping." They celebrate their newly found freedom.

noibl 16y ago

There's more to Intellectual positioning than signalling one's intelligence, even if the underlying motives are assumed to be more-or-less base. Hipsterism in general is about being ahead of the curve, not necessarily being the smartest in the room. With Intellectual Hipsterism that means being conversant with the latest ideas, not the most complex ideas. To be up-to-date with the latest radical thinking gives one a privileged position in the discourse because the proportion of the group for whom your input seems novel and interesting becomes greater. This puts the Intellectual Hipster at odds with the mere 'meta-contrarian' because a conservative opinion conservatively argued will never be perceived as novel or interesting. The Intellectually hip[1] will therefore argue in favour of a passé or seemingly discredited position using novel (conbinations of) techniques and references, thereby making the retro idea cool again! --This post sponsored by the IH Institute, Salt Lake City-- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek

Psyonic 16y ago
Last I heard the IH Institute was in Portland...

waterhouse 16y ago

To the extent that "contrarian", "meta-contrarian", "meta-meta-contrarian", etc. people spread themselves over the ideological map, it becomes difficult to win favor by adopting a particular viewpoint (e.g. you'll get the contrarians and the meta-meta-meta-contrarians, but you'll piss off the meta-contrarians and slightly alienate the uneducated and the meta-meta-contrarians), and in the proximate future, people will adopt viewpoints more for other reasons--hopefully, because they care about the issue and have given it serious thought. Once the zero-sum game of winning relative favor becomes saturated with fierce competition, new people will be discouraged from entering it, and will spend their effort on more productive things. Also, once you notice a bunch of similar people (meta^n-contrarians) who argue several different sides of an issue, you stop thinking of each side as being, e.g., "traditional country folk vs. college students"; the ideas become dissociated from groups of people, and your opinion of an idea becomes dissociated from your opinion of a group. All you have to go on is the shape of the idea itself, which, I think, is the best way to approach ideas if you're searching for truth. A while ago, someone posted the story "Rent a White Guy", which demonstrated how some clever Japanese companies took advantage of their potential clients' or investors' prejudice towards white CEOs by "renting" a white guy to act like a top executive for the duration of the company's presentation. I thought this was a good thing, because prejudiced investors who found out about tricks like this would have to stop bothering about the issue with future companies, unless they put a fair amount of effort into investigating whether the real CEO was in fact white. This would make things better for naive Japanese companies who didn't even consider the issue and just had their (Japanese) CEO do the presentation; and it would reduce the advantage of companies who did have white CEOs. I think this is all to the good. For people who do real work and just can't be bothered to think about putting on peacock feathers, hardcore hipster fakers are friends and protectors. They make it harder for civilians to tell the difference between a "hip" guy who deliberately dresses unfashionably and a guy who dresses unfashionably because he doesn't think about how he dresses, he thinks about other things. This makes it easier to be a nerd (defined as someone who can't be bothered to do things because they are fashionable). I, for one, thoroughly approve of these people.

Psyonic 16y ago
Your ideas about the white fake CEO's make sense, but I'm not so sure about the hipsters. The problem there is even though hipsters do dress "unfashionably", they always do it in a way thats different than those who aren't trying at all. In other words, most people don't have trouble distinguishing the two.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

At first I thought the author had inadvertently let some typos slip through, and that slightly annoyed me. Then I realized on further reading that the author was deliberately using third-person pronoun neologisms, and that seriously annoyed me.

roel_v 16y ago
Do you mean as in "Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad." ? I've only ever seen it in this post and I figured it were a couple of typos, or a CMS eating 'th' for some reason.
- sesqu 16y ago
  I assumed it was a parser eating the code point for a dental fricative, added in some misguided attempt to re-introduce ligatures at the data level. Pronoun neologisms never occurred to me. It seems there's real harm in knowing about useless things.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Ok so you got me curious :) since I only know ligatures as, in my simple understanding, two glyphs that are joined together for typographic (visual) purposes. Googling 'dental fricative', that seems to be about phonetic spelling. Would you mind explaining? Is the unicode code point for a 'dental fricative' the same as the bytes of t and h in succession? How does the ligature fit in?
    - sesqu 16y ago
      I can't properly explain something I was wrong about. But yes, "dental fricative" is the "th" sound made by pressing your tongue against your teeth. An example would be the sound in "teeth", written "ti:θ" with the international phonetic alphabet. I assumed someone had read about how, say, "the" was once written "þe" and gone off to restore the usage, as certain people are wont to do. Except that would be overly confusing, so I further assumed that what they found was instead a ligature, a combination of two letters for mostly shorthand and visual purposes, here for the digraph "th". Turns out that there is no such unicode code point - the visually closest thing I can find is ᵺ, and as seen above, it's not even a symbol for the fricative.

drblast 16y ago

I remember this phenomenon from high school English class. The teacher would ask an obvious question, and inevitably someone would reflexively provide the non-obvious wrong answer. I assumed the thought process was this: a teacher hardly ever asks questions with obvious answers, and I rarely understand what's going on, so when I give an answer I'm going to say the opposite of the obvious answer because that will probably be right. It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important. I know there is a better name for this than "meta-contrarian." Unfortunately my education is failing myself here. :-)

crystalis 16y ago
You might be thinking of hypercorrection, which does seem to intersect at points with meta-contrarianism.
maw 16y ago
It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important. You and myself (and I wonder whom else) accord that this is the penultimate instance that phenomena.

onefortwo 16y ago

When expressing in English my intelligence must be the half that when expression in my native language. And my IQ must be on average. So I will not read a post intended for a CI above 140, I only answer to the comment of drblast guy. If a teacher ask a question with an obvious answer like what is 3 + 3, then I can tell that it depends of the radix use are using, or if you are using 3 as a polynomial in some finite character field, or if you are using some computer language in which the symbols plus is concatenation of strings and the given operation is an error. In any case perhaps any of those answer should bother the teacher, so finally I should say excuse me ...

doki_pen 16y ago

Hmm.. It is fun to come up with a different angle on a common argument, even if you don't seriously believe it. Could it be just nature encouraging us to signal intelligence? Maybe. Does it matter? I know sex is for making babies, but I still enjoy it. I didn't stop when I figured out that it was only enjoyable for the purposes of evolution.

olalonde 16y ago

Conclusion: if you're part of the over-intelligent crowd, resist the temptation of signaling. Let's see if some meta^x-contrarian is going to argue with this :)

crux 16y ago

I found myself completely stymied once that article got to the section about death. I haven't read their other articles on the subject, but they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'. That seems insane to me. Does anybody think that a world without death—or even human death—would be less than hellish? Is it really false wisdom to be glad that living things, or living people, do not infinitely multiply, age, expand, consume resources? Or even false wisdom to try to see the good in the death of an individual? Further, the author takes it as uncontroversial that it is 'wrong' to dwell on the problems of modern industrial society, and hypothesizes that one would only do it in order to signal one's intelligence. They don't think it would be useful—indeed, necessary—for many people to spend a lot of time thinking about the ills of A just because you can conclude that it is a greater good than not-A? Is that really the only way that it works? If I mention that industrial society destroys the environment and alienates the individual, then my argument must be, 'therefore, it is ultimately an evil, and we should scrap it for unelectrified villages.' I like the way the author illustrates the signalling effect in terms of consumption, culture, and even cocktail party conversation; but I'm not sure the mechanism is quite as strong as they think. Another way of putting it is: a lot of the intellectual arguments that the author likes to cast as counter signalling games can just as easily be characterized as successive philosophies and arguments that respond to the facts available to them and the values of the societies in which they arise. You COULD say that very intelligent people who don't want to give aid to Africa are motivated by a need to counter-signal the rather intelligent people who do; or you could say that they are motivated by their own understanding of the best way to increase the economic condition in Africa. If both of those could be said of any person, what value does this psychological model really have?

endtime 16y ago
>they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'. Eliezer talked about this at at the Singularity Summit...I can't find the slides, but his subsequent update of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (yes, really) pretty much said the same thing. The relevant part starts around halfway down this chapter: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_... I think this is a pretty common position among the futurist/transhumanist/singularitarian community. The standard inductive argument is basically "I want to be alive tomorrow, and tomorrow I will feel the same way. Therefore, I will never want to die." Edit: Oh, the other point that is often made is that if you grew up on a planet where everyone randomly got hit over the head with a baseball bat every few minutes, there would probably be people who talk about how this is a good thing, because it helps you greater appreciate the bat-free minutes and helps you stay on your toes, etc. But, other things being equal, as an Earthling you probably wouldn't want to go and live on that world. Likewise, if you came form a society where people didn't die, and someone offered you the opportunity to completely cease to exist one day, you probably wouldn't take it.

Tycho 16y ago

It's a good read but this contour-signalling only works when you have two or three levels at play. The question is whether his/her grouping of people into two or three tiers is realistic, useful, or arbitrary. Upper-middle-lower-upper-middle-middle class etc.

m-photonic 16y ago

I can understand the article's placement of libertarianism at the top of the political triad, but at the same time it does seem like (in online arguments at least) people with nuanced positions more often make an effort to distinguish themselves from libertarians than from liberals or conservatives.

araneae 16y ago
Yes, those would be the meta-meta-contrarians.

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starpilot 16y ago

Here's an "uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide" triad, about Facebook: what's facebook? / facebook is great! / facebook is beneath me, and I rarely use it (Marco Arment: http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumblrs-marco-arment/ http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumbl... ) So, tech hipsters, you too can join in on the fun.

rms 16y ago
/ Facebook is beneath me and I can't stop refreshing.