4 ms·

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,

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."
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  You understand, of course, that if I tell you that you are disagreeing with me simply because of counter-signaling, I am using an ad-hominem argument. It's another way of saying that you say has no value because you are the type of person who says such things for frivolous reasons. It is the worst form of intellectual masturbation -- the putting on of airs to diagnose the reasons that other opinions exist in the world. Please don't let yourself do this. Ever. Yes I understand that the author tried to dress this up as a self-analysis type of article, especially at the end, but the implication and thrust was pretty clear: we are analyzing the reasons others do and say things, especially things we find "wrong". Oh, and by the way, don't let yourself do this! But if the article was meant as introspection, it would have been written as introspection ("I find myself..." etc) Sigh. Please don't quote another article with the same source in a rebuttal. It makes the discussion about the site itself instead of the particular text in question. Its smacks of fanboyism. I know I started this with my closing remarks about the site itself, but the thrust of my point is that the article was plainly suboptimal. I stand by that assessment. I apologize if the remarks I offered on the site overall offended you. You know you are in for trouble if the article begins with one site author quoting another as if they were a famous person. I knew a guy once that closed his emails by quoting himself. Not a good sign.
  - cousin_it 16y ago
    It seems your argument could be extended to attack the whole enterprise of identifying and overcoming cognitive biases, not just this specific post by Yvain. To me this constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of your argument.
rms 16y ago
DH4? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html I am not sure of what the slightly different argument you are arguing against is. Did you think that the article said that meta-contrarians are bad? I'm pretty sure the author, Yvain, thinks meta-contrarians are good, for certain definitions of the word good. This article doesn't claim to be some sort of definitive theory of human behavior. It's an entertaining essay on hipsters. Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  DH5 - I qutoed the author regarding counter-signaling, then provided an example of why his premise not only did not hold but was counter-productive. I could go on at lengths with counter-examples if you'd like. Instead I found such list-making pedantic, and moved to the generalization of my refutation. But you need to decide which tack you are taking. Are you saying it's frivolous and I am taking it too seriously? Or that it's a serious article and I didn't refute it well enough? The article, oddly enough, wasn't about meta-contrarians. It was about counter-signaling. The meta-contrarian part was added as a shell. Seems like there are a lot of fans here. I'm sure I'll be downvoted into oblivion, so it doesn't matter that much. I'm outta here.
  - crystalis 16y ago
    I'm not sure scare-quoting "meta-contrarian" counts as quoting the author. Which is to say, if you can't even grasp your own writing, how can we expect you to grasp someone else's? It may all be "obvious" to you, but there's plenty of margin here.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      The old money might have started off not buying flashy things for pragmatic reasons - they didn't need to, so why waste the money? But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the old money actively cultivated an air of superiority to the nouveau riche and their conspicuous consumption; not buying flashy objects becomes a matter of principle. This makes sense: the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche. Ignoring the throwaway at the beginning, the rich may become and stay rich because of a strange thing called frugality, which in many societies is considered a virtue. A total loser might come up to a woman without a hint of romance, promise her nothing, and demand sex. A more sophisticated man might buy roses for a woman, write her love poetry, hover on her every wish, et cetera; this signifies that he is not a total loser. But the most desirable men may deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are so high status that they don't need to. The average man tries to differentiate himself from the total loser by being nice; the extremely attractive man tries to differentiate himself from the average man by not being especially nice. See the dozens of human sexuality articles -- most of them posted here -- on why men do things (or not) to attract women. Much of the consensus is that both the ignoring and providing things of ephemeral value are social signalling devices, not counter-signals. In other words, what the author thinks of as signalling (and perhaps many men do as well) is actually not signalling. It's not that there's one thing and then another on the opposite side, it's that the signalling mechanism itself is poorly understood. So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side of the argument is wrong. If your hypothesis is that people adopt intellectual positions as a signal of intelligence, then the positions themselves do not matter. One could pick any absurd topic -- death in this case -- and find those coming out in support of it simply for signaling purposes. The error here is subtle yet pernicious: there may in fact be very good reasons for thinking death is a good thing. I don't know. Beats me. But I do know that once I start thinking of other positions in terms of signalling, I'm no longer thinking of the benefit or drawbacks of the argument. [Insert long discussion here on the definition and uses of the ad hominem] This was the author's self-identified thesis. And it is a logical fallacy. (to restate: people take "wrong" positions purely for reasons of signalling) That enough for you?
crystalis 16y ago
One basic problem is extending a specific case to all general cases. but that doesn't mean deciding Mersenne primes are an unhelpful concept because the number 15 exists is a good thing.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
I think you are simply unfamiliar with lesswrong. They write articles like this all the time, and they are usually targeted at biases which afflict lesswrong readers disproportionately. A quick look finds at least 3 articles of this nature in the past 2 weeks [1]. The article also does not advocate for lumping people into the meta-contrarian class and discounting their opinions. It explicitly says not to do that: "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". [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ql/error_detection_bias_in_research/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ql/error_detection_bias_in_research... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distrac... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pw/the_affect_heuristic_sentiment_and_art/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pw/the_affect_heuristic_sentiment_a...
- rms 16y ago
  Also, the more recent articles on Less Wrong do have a tendency towards the esoteric and insular. The best postings on Less Wrong were done by Eliezer Yudkowsky a while ago, archived at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences.
loewenskind 16y ago
>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. Bad example. Sam Walton is a classic example of a "counter signal" and he knew quite well what he was doing. When he was alive executives were forbidden from driving their expensive cars to the office. From the Bentonville Walmart store, you can see a large mansion on a hill. It was built by an executive at Walmart. Sam Walton told him that if he must build such a home he would have to build it out of site. Especially out of the sight of store employees. The man refused to hide his hard earned wealth and built the mansion. Walton fired him.
- Eliezer 16y ago
  Sam Walton was awesome. I don't care if he did it as a coldly calculated matter of image, he's still awesome.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    I couldn't disagree more, but I suppose no productive outcome could come of discussing it further so I'll just leave it at that.
ugh 16y ago
One theme of many lesswrong articles is to identify possible human biases. This article seems to be consistent with that theme. The article simply posits a possible bias. Do you think that those who first hypothesized about and described confirmation bias wanted to throw dirt or find a label for their opponents? Do you think that identifying human biases is not a worthy activity? I’m not really sure why you seem to be so enraged about this article. Your belief that signaling doesn’t show itself in much of human behavior is fair enough and a valid criticism. I just don’t think that ad hominem was necessary. At least provide some evidence, some quote as to why you think the author wants nothing but to throw dirt.

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."

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
You understand, of course, that if I tell you that you are disagreeing with me simply because of counter-signaling, I am using an ad-hominem argument. It's another way of saying that you say has no value because you are the type of person who says such things for frivolous reasons. It is the worst form of intellectual masturbation -- the putting on of airs to diagnose the reasons that other opinions exist in the world. Please don't let yourself do this. Ever. Yes I understand that the author tried to dress this up as a self-analysis type of article, especially at the end, but the implication and thrust was pretty clear: we are analyzing the reasons others do and say things, especially things we find "wrong". Oh, and by the way, don't let yourself do this! But if the article was meant as introspection, it would have been written as introspection ("I find myself..." etc) Sigh. Please don't quote another article with the same source in a rebuttal. It makes the discussion about the site itself instead of the particular text in question. Its smacks of fanboyism. I know I started this with my closing remarks about the site itself, but the thrust of my point is that the article was plainly suboptimal. I stand by that assessment. I apologize if the remarks I offered on the site overall offended you. You know you are in for trouble if the article begins with one site author quoting another as if they were a famous person. I knew a guy once that closed his emails by quoting himself. Not a good sign.
- cousin_it 16y ago
  It seems your argument could be extended to attack the whole enterprise of identifying and overcoming cognitive biases, not just this specific post by Yvain. To me this constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of your argument.

rms 16y ago

DH4? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html I am not sure of what the slightly different argument you are arguing against is. Did you think that the article said that meta-contrarians are bad? I'm pretty sure the author, Yvain, thinks meta-contrarians are good, for certain definitions of the word good. This article doesn't claim to be some sort of definitive theory of human behavior. It's an entertaining essay on hipsters. Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
DH5 - I qutoed the author regarding counter-signaling, then provided an example of why his premise not only did not hold but was counter-productive. I could go on at lengths with counter-examples if you'd like. Instead I found such list-making pedantic, and moved to the generalization of my refutation. But you need to decide which tack you are taking. Are you saying it's frivolous and I am taking it too seriously? Or that it's a serious article and I didn't refute it well enough? The article, oddly enough, wasn't about meta-contrarians. It was about counter-signaling. The meta-contrarian part was added as a shell. Seems like there are a lot of fans here. I'm sure I'll be downvoted into oblivion, so it doesn't matter that much. I'm outta here.
- crystalis 16y ago
  I'm not sure scare-quoting "meta-contrarian" counts as quoting the author. Which is to say, if you can't even grasp your own writing, how can we expect you to grasp someone else's? It may all be "obvious" to you, but there's plenty of margin here.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    The old money might have started off not buying flashy things for pragmatic reasons - they didn't need to, so why waste the money? But if F. Scott Fitzgerald is to be believed, the old money actively cultivated an air of superiority to the nouveau riche and their conspicuous consumption; not buying flashy objects becomes a matter of principle. This makes sense: the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche. Ignoring the throwaway at the beginning, the rich may become and stay rich because of a strange thing called frugality, which in many societies is considered a virtue. A total loser might come up to a woman without a hint of romance, promise her nothing, and demand sex. A more sophisticated man might buy roses for a woman, write her love poetry, hover on her every wish, et cetera; this signifies that he is not a total loser. But the most desirable men may deliberately avoid doing nice things for women in an attempt to signal they are so high status that they don't need to. The average man tries to differentiate himself from the total loser by being nice; the extremely attractive man tries to differentiate himself from the average man by not being especially nice. See the dozens of human sexuality articles -- most of them posted here -- on why men do things (or not) to attract women. Much of the consensus is that both the ignoring and providing things of ephemeral value are social signalling devices, not counter-signals. In other words, what the author thinks of as signalling (and perhaps many men do as well) is actually not signalling. It's not that there's one thing and then another on the opposite side, it's that the signalling mechanism itself is poorly understood. So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side of the argument is wrong. If your hypothesis is that people adopt intellectual positions as a signal of intelligence, then the positions themselves do not matter. One could pick any absurd topic -- death in this case -- and find those coming out in support of it simply for signaling purposes. The error here is subtle yet pernicious: there may in fact be very good reasons for thinking death is a good thing. I don't know. Beats me. But I do know that once I start thinking of other positions in terms of signalling, I'm no longer thinking of the benefit or drawbacks of the argument. [Insert long discussion here on the definition and uses of the ad hominem] This was the author's self-identified thesis. And it is a logical fallacy. (to restate: people take "wrong" positions purely for reasons of signalling) That enough for you?

crystalis 16y ago

One basic problem is extending a specific case to all general cases. but that doesn't mean deciding Mersenne primes are an unhelpful concept because the number 15 exists is a good thing.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

I think you are simply unfamiliar with lesswrong. They write articles like this all the time, and they are usually targeted at biases which afflict lesswrong readers disproportionately. A quick look finds at least 3 articles of this nature in the past 2 weeks [1]. The article also does not advocate for lumping people into the meta-contrarian class and discounting their opinions. It explicitly says not to do that: "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". [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ql/error_detection_bias_in_research/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ql/error_detection_bias_in_research... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distraction_why_less/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distrac... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pw/the_affect_heuristic_sentiment_and_art/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pw/the_affect_heuristic_sentiment_a...

rms 16y ago
Also, the more recent articles on Less Wrong do have a tendency towards the esoteric and insular. The best postings on Less Wrong were done by Eliezer Yudkowsky a while ago, archived at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences.

loewenskind 16y ago

>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. Bad example. Sam Walton is a classic example of a "counter signal" and he knew quite well what he was doing. When he was alive executives were forbidden from driving their expensive cars to the office. From the Bentonville Walmart store, you can see a large mansion on a hill. It was built by an executive at Walmart. Sam Walton told him that if he must build such a home he would have to build it out of site. Especially out of the sight of store employees. The man refused to hide his hard earned wealth and built the mansion. Walton fired him.

Eliezer 16y ago
Sam Walton was awesome. I don't care if he did it as a coldly calculated matter of image, he's still awesome.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  I couldn't disagree more, but I suppose no productive outcome could come of discussing it further so I'll just leave it at that.

ugh 16y ago

One theme of many lesswrong articles is to identify possible human biases. This article seems to be consistent with that theme. The article simply posits a possible bias. Do you think that those who first hypothesized about and described confirmation bias wanted to throw dirt or find a label for their opponents? Do you think that identifying human biases is not a worthy activity? I’m not really sure why you seem to be so enraged about this article. Your belief that signaling doesn’t show itself in much of human behavior is fair enough and a valid criticism. I just don’t think that ad hominem was necessary. At least provide some evidence, some quote as to why you think the author wants nothing but to throw dirt.