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Sigh, slow news week.
Dexter and why meta-contrarians suck.
Dexter was a show about a serial-killer that aired on Showtime. It was pretty good, especially the early seasons. The premise, for those of you who don't know, is that Dexter was a "good" serial killer who only killed other killers.
If killers are bad, then Dexter was good because he reduced the number of killers.
You know who would really suck? A meta-Dexter who only killed Dexters.
... and that's how I see meta-contrarians.
"Let a thousand flowers bloom", the contrarians say, considering all sorts of weird and different ideas. "Actually, the rose is already the best flower and you smell bad" says the meta-contrarian, smugly.
Who are these meta-contrarians you ask? They are mustachioed hipsters of the rationalist community. They might dabble in some forbidden thoughts, but they don't take them seriously. Because, after all, the default hypthosis is usually the correct one.
And, yes, the default hypthosis usually is correct. But contrarians serve a valuable purpose, even if they are wrong more often than not! Because not EVERY default hypothesis is correct. And without contrarians we'll never find out which ones are wrong.
So I think it's important to give contrarians a lot MORE grace than people who espouse the default opinion. Meta-contrarians give them LESS grace. And that's why they suck.
I've never heard of this before. Do you have any examples?
My biggest beef is with the people who want to police AI "doomerism".
Big Yud is probably wrong about AI. But I think his ideas are valuable, much more so than the army of normies who own $NVDA stock and think AI is neato keen, isn't science fucking awesome?
Contrarians are society's immune system and should be respected as such. Sometimes they attack healthy tissue, but we're so much better off with them then without.
Is that like the effective accelerationists? That would probably make a more interesting top level post. As far as I can tell, not following the issue closely, they are not “meta contrarians,” but simply a different group, with perceived interests opposed to Yud. Being aware of someone and not believing them doesn’t make a position meta. Are the people down thread making fun of the carpet moth effective altruist somehow meta for thinking she took things too far and made a fool of herself?
Here's my model.
Normie opinion. AI is great because it will create jobs or something. Sam Altman actually tweeted this, which proves that he's just playing the game: "building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness." So ask yourself. What would a 70-year old senator think. This is the normie opinion.
Contrarian. Actually, maybe we shouldn't build AGI if we want to survive as a species.
Meta-contrarian: Lol, don't you know nothing ever happens. Contrarians are always wrong. Let's listen to the normies.
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