4 ms·

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

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?
- khafra 16y ago
  You seem to believe that this article means LessWrong officially advocates considering all arguments only in terms of whether their proponents are holding them ingenuously. If you could be convinced that this were not the case, any lingering disagreement would be due to consistency effects.

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?

khafra 16y ago
You seem to believe that this article means LessWrong officially advocates considering all arguments only in terms of whether their proponents are holding them ingenuously. If you could be convinced that this were not the case, any lingering disagreement would be due to consistency effects.