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Notes -
But is Big Yud a contrarian? His themes on AI being a danger certainly tend to, broadly speaking, poll well.
I don't think that "meta-contrarian" is a thing, really. Being a contrarian is more about being a type of a person than having a particular position. A contrarian will drift from a crowd to crowd when his contrarianism starts getting on a previous crowd's nerves, but his personality causes him to almost immediately start contrarian-ing towards that new crowd as well, leading to that crowd, getting annoyed too. What seems like "meta-contrarianism" is, then, a contrarian having found a new group (of people who are, probably falsely, called contrarians, even though they just have a minority position on some issue) and then starting his contrarian thing.
Someone like Michael Tracey really seems like the contrarian type. When I encountered Tracey on Twitter, he was in the process of splitting from the left due to his posting on how the Floyd drama had led to an increase in crime and urban decay, putting him adjacent to a more rightwards position; it was then possible to observe how Tracey himself noted this and started bashing the right as well. When I read Eduard Limonov's biography, he seemed to have similar tendencies, first becoming a Soviet dissident and then getting annoyed with the dissident "in-crowd" and becoming a Stalin appreciator to get on their nerves.
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