Really my main issue with contrarianism is that increasingly narrow social circles mean it's really hard to tell what is actually contrarian. The idea behind contrarianism being virtuous is that it proves you're willing to incur social costs to defend truth, but if you say "I support shrimp welfare" and all your friends are Effective Altruists, you aren't incurring any social costs. If anything, the contrarian view that incurs social costs for you would be to go around telling people you hate shrimp and want the nasty little bugs to suffer. Then all your friends will hate you and think you're weird.
I think a lot of people think of themselves as brave contrarians when really they're just parroting the views their social circle agrees with and basking in the applause. This is why annoying people on reddit say things like "unpopular opinion, but I think Trump is bad" and get 3000 upvotes for being a brave contrarian. After all, Trump won the popular vote, so anyone who goes against him must be pushing back against the will of the majority and incurring massive social costs... right?
Seems to me it would be very hard for 3 to be true.
First, whenever P doesn't entail Q, P&Q is less probable than P (except in infinitary cases where they both already have probability 0).
So by adding on weird addenda to your view, you're necessarily making it less probable.
Can its probability be decreasing very slowly, while its weirdness is increasing quickly? I don't see why we should think that's in general possible; why should there always be highly weird but not highly improbable propositions consistent with (but not entailed) by any arbitrary weird view you happen to hold? Shouldn't there generally be some connection between weirdness and improbability? (after all, intuition doesn't come from nowhere--it's shaped by cultural and evolutionary learning to be reasonably useful; most things that are counterintuitive are false.)
Since "weirdness" refers to social acceptance alone, it seems reasonable to me that it could grow faster than raw implausibility. I mean, the fact that substantially-neglected views exist *at all* is good evidence for this effect being possible. Though I'll admit it really might not happen in general, and I'm not sure if I could give a great example off the top of my head. Maybe something like "shrimp welfare matters" --> "shrimp welfare matters and hot dogs are types of tacos." Like, you've lost a lot of social acceptance, but you're not really mandating significantly less plausible ethical behavior.
Maybe the error there is that "hot dogs are types of tacos" isn't a moral stance? But it's not clear to me that the "contrarianism is good" view naturally restricts itself to "contrarian *moral* stances are good." And even if it did, you could expand the stance to "hot dogs are types of tacos and it would be very slightly good if people stopped misclassifying them." Again, most of the moral weight of the view sits in the shrimp claim, but the hot dog claim is the one that loses you a ton of social acceptance—so, presumably, it's much more virtuous to be a shrimp welfarist *and* a hot dog–taco truther.
My counter argument is that weirdness is a virtue in the long-term because weirdness and openness increase innovation. Innovation is good. So, we should give people bonus points for weirdness.
If I say "stay hydrated," this isn't weird. If I say, "I wear a funny hat that holds water in it with a straw to keep me constantly hydrated," that's weird. If I say, "I also wear a special condom that connects to a receptacle to store my pee, which I then use as a natural ammonia fertilizer for my organic garden," that's really weird.
Conservatives are the opposite: they aren't weird, they're sadistic. They want to hurt people because they look different, sound different, or were born on a different patch of soil. This is "normal." I will choose Bentham's "scary radicalism" over that.
It's silly to associate "assassinating healthcare CEOs" and "donating to shrimp charities." Those two things are not connected or equivalent at all.
The CEO shooting is popular, not weird. That's why I would argue against it, and I think Bentham would too.
I think you’re conflating tech & moral innovation a bit. I agree that keeping our society open to new tech developments is good and that people who do weird techy things are virtuous—but I don’t think the virtue flows from the weirdness intrinsically. It’s simply that techy weirdness has a ton of instrumental value: I’m about to get on an airplane! That was once a techy weirdness, but the Wright brothers persisted, and now it’s much easier to do cool things far away.
Moral innovation happens too—Will MacAskill argued that the end of slavery in the British Empire could be traced back to just a few crusading abolitionist Quakers. But it’s a lot less reliably good—expanding our moral circle sometimes looks like freeing slaves, but it also sometimes looks like DEI craziness or like declaring farm animal welfare to be an overwhelming priority, oh no wait I mean wild animal welfare, oh no wait I mean shrimp welfare, oh no wait I mean insect welfare.
The market tells you when a new weird technology is good—if it sticks around, it’s doing its innovate-y job—and so increasing variance is simply a good idea. But the moral picture is much cloudier: if factory farming is the worst thing ever, then my marginal dollar shouldn’t go the Against Malaria Foundation, it should go to some animal charity. But then if it turns out that insect suffering is the worst thing ever, then maybe factory farming is actually net *good* because it reduces land available for insect life, and I need to totally reevaluate my giving again. Increasing variance in moral ideas leads generally to increased confusion and contradiction—it doesn’t have the same instrumental value. That’s the connection I see between CEO-shooting and shrimp welfare.
“to be institutionalized, something must be fairly popular, fairly mainstream—to fight institutions, then, is weird and worth lots of virtue points.”
Basically, what else do you do with weird views? Isn’t the point that society believes and does one thing, you bravely and weirdly think it should be doing something else, and so you spend your time trying to make society do your thing instead?
The “spending most of our time” comes from an assumption of virtue-maxxing. And I don’t think it’s a crazy assumption: if you have two views of similar moral importance to you, and one is weirder than the other, you should mostly be spending your effort on the weird one. This is just a virtuey reframing of the ‘Negligence’ bit that EAs talk about w/r/t cause prioritization.
Why would you assume I believe in some principle along the lines of “the sole determinant of virtue is whether you are unpopular,” and not the principle I actually explicated, that “one of many determinants of virtue is the quality of your ideas, regardless of whether they’re correct, especially if they require thinking independently”?
When did I assume you think contrarianism is the “sole” determinant of birtue? I really think it’s not a determinant at all, or if it is, it’s so minimal and so countered by its other unvirtuous implications (radicalism!) that we shouldn’t care.
Jessie’s point is mine on Jesus—if you follow his moral teachings, you’re not a contrarian, so you get fewer virtue points.
Ah, well that was in reference to your claim that “the smartest and most interesting people in the world are also the most controversial and despised.” I think you’re wrong and that lots of very smart and interesting people are not so controversial or despised, and I also think that often controversy and despision (?) are signs of unvirtuousness among such people. The Bill Gates / SBF comparison is meant to be an intuition pump against controversy as a signal of virtue.
Really my main issue with contrarianism is that increasingly narrow social circles mean it's really hard to tell what is actually contrarian. The idea behind contrarianism being virtuous is that it proves you're willing to incur social costs to defend truth, but if you say "I support shrimp welfare" and all your friends are Effective Altruists, you aren't incurring any social costs. If anything, the contrarian view that incurs social costs for you would be to go around telling people you hate shrimp and want the nasty little bugs to suffer. Then all your friends will hate you and think you're weird.
I think a lot of people think of themselves as brave contrarians when really they're just parroting the views their social circle agrees with and basking in the applause. This is why annoying people on reddit say things like "unpopular opinion, but I think Trump is bad" and get 3000 upvotes for being a brave contrarian. After all, Trump won the popular vote, so anyone who goes against him must be pushing back against the will of the majority and incurring massive social costs... right?
Seems to me it would be very hard for 3 to be true.
First, whenever P doesn't entail Q, P&Q is less probable than P (except in infinitary cases where they both already have probability 0).
So by adding on weird addenda to your view, you're necessarily making it less probable.
Can its probability be decreasing very slowly, while its weirdness is increasing quickly? I don't see why we should think that's in general possible; why should there always be highly weird but not highly improbable propositions consistent with (but not entailed) by any arbitrary weird view you happen to hold? Shouldn't there generally be some connection between weirdness and improbability? (after all, intuition doesn't come from nowhere--it's shaped by cultural and evolutionary learning to be reasonably useful; most things that are counterintuitive are false.)
Since "weirdness" refers to social acceptance alone, it seems reasonable to me that it could grow faster than raw implausibility. I mean, the fact that substantially-neglected views exist *at all* is good evidence for this effect being possible. Though I'll admit it really might not happen in general, and I'm not sure if I could give a great example off the top of my head. Maybe something like "shrimp welfare matters" --> "shrimp welfare matters and hot dogs are types of tacos." Like, you've lost a lot of social acceptance, but you're not really mandating significantly less plausible ethical behavior.
Maybe the error there is that "hot dogs are types of tacos" isn't a moral stance? But it's not clear to me that the "contrarianism is good" view naturally restricts itself to "contrarian *moral* stances are good." And even if it did, you could expand the stance to "hot dogs are types of tacos and it would be very slightly good if people stopped misclassifying them." Again, most of the moral weight of the view sits in the shrimp claim, but the hot dog claim is the one that loses you a ton of social acceptance—so, presumably, it's much more virtuous to be a shrimp welfarist *and* a hot dog–taco truther.
My counter argument is that weirdness is a virtue in the long-term because weirdness and openness increase innovation. Innovation is good. So, we should give people bonus points for weirdness.
If I say "stay hydrated," this isn't weird. If I say, "I wear a funny hat that holds water in it with a straw to keep me constantly hydrated," that's weird. If I say, "I also wear a special condom that connects to a receptacle to store my pee, which I then use as a natural ammonia fertilizer for my organic garden," that's really weird.
Conservatives are the opposite: they aren't weird, they're sadistic. They want to hurt people because they look different, sound different, or were born on a different patch of soil. This is "normal." I will choose Bentham's "scary radicalism" over that.
It's silly to associate "assassinating healthcare CEOs" and "donating to shrimp charities." Those two things are not connected or equivalent at all.
The CEO shooting is popular, not weird. That's why I would argue against it, and I think Bentham would too.
I think you’re conflating tech & moral innovation a bit. I agree that keeping our society open to new tech developments is good and that people who do weird techy things are virtuous—but I don’t think the virtue flows from the weirdness intrinsically. It’s simply that techy weirdness has a ton of instrumental value: I’m about to get on an airplane! That was once a techy weirdness, but the Wright brothers persisted, and now it’s much easier to do cool things far away.
Moral innovation happens too—Will MacAskill argued that the end of slavery in the British Empire could be traced back to just a few crusading abolitionist Quakers. But it’s a lot less reliably good—expanding our moral circle sometimes looks like freeing slaves, but it also sometimes looks like DEI craziness or like declaring farm animal welfare to be an overwhelming priority, oh no wait I mean wild animal welfare, oh no wait I mean shrimp welfare, oh no wait I mean insect welfare.
The market tells you when a new weird technology is good—if it sticks around, it’s doing its innovate-y job—and so increasing variance is simply a good idea. But the moral picture is much cloudier: if factory farming is the worst thing ever, then my marginal dollar shouldn’t go the Against Malaria Foundation, it should go to some animal charity. But then if it turns out that insect suffering is the worst thing ever, then maybe factory farming is actually net *good* because it reduces land available for insect life, and I need to totally reevaluate my giving again. Increasing variance in moral ideas leads generally to increased confusion and contradiction—it doesn’t have the same instrumental value. That’s the connection I see between CEO-shooting and shrimp welfare.
"If weird views are better than non-weird ones, we should be spending most of our time destroying various social institutions."
Wait, lol, why does this follow?
“to be institutionalized, something must be fairly popular, fairly mainstream—to fight institutions, then, is weird and worth lots of virtue points.”
Basically, what else do you do with weird views? Isn’t the point that society believes and does one thing, you bravely and weirdly think it should be doing something else, and so you spend your time trying to make society do your thing instead?
The “spending most of our time” comes from an assumption of virtue-maxxing. And I don’t think it’s a crazy assumption: if you have two views of similar moral importance to you, and one is weirder than the other, you should mostly be spending your effort on the weird one. This is just a virtuey reframing of the ‘Negligence’ bit that EAs talk about w/r/t cause prioritization.
Why would you assume I believe in some principle along the lines of “the sole determinant of virtue is whether you are unpopular,” and not the principle I actually explicated, that “one of many determinants of virtue is the quality of your ideas, regardless of whether they’re correct, especially if they require thinking independently”?
Also, are you saying Jesus wasn’t persecuted???
Well, it isn't contrarian to agree with Jesus at least.
When did I assume you think contrarianism is the “sole” determinant of birtue? I really think it’s not a determinant at all, or if it is, it’s so minimal and so countered by its other unvirtuous implications (radicalism!) that we shouldn’t care.
Jessie’s point is mine on Jesus—if you follow his moral teachings, you’re not a contrarian, so you get fewer virtue points.
That's how it comes across in the paragraph where you say I shouldn't think Bill Gates is virtuous because he has not positive favorability.
Ah, well that was in reference to your claim that “the smartest and most interesting people in the world are also the most controversial and despised.” I think you’re wrong and that lots of very smart and interesting people are not so controversial or despised, and I also think that often controversy and despision (?) are signs of unvirtuousness among such people. The Bill Gates / SBF comparison is meant to be an intuition pump against controversy as a signal of virtue.