What wedrifid said- just because someone on Less Wrong got angry at a contrarian and called them something doesn’t mean Less Wrong holds them in low regard or ignores them.
Multifoliaterose angered a bunch of people (including me) with his early posts, because he thought he could show major logical flaws in reasoning he’d never encountered. But after a while, he settled down, understood what people were actually saying, and started writing criticisms that made sense to his intended audience. He is what I’d consider a good contrarian: I often end up disagreeing with his conclusions, but it’s worth my while to read his posts and re-think my own reasoning.
Robin Hanson is another good contrarian- although I can point to where I fundamentally disagree with him on the possibility of hard takeoff (and on many other things), I still read everything he posts because he often brings up ideas I wouldn’t have thought of myself.
Phil Goetz is kind of a special case: I find he has interesting things to say unless he’s talking about metaethics or decision theory.
One thing that these three have in common is that they read and understood the Sequences, so that they’re criticizing what Less Wrong contributors actually think rather than straw-man caricatures. By contrast, you wrote a post accusing us of failure to Taboo intelligence that shows complete ignorance of the fact that Eliezer explicitly did that in the Sequences. A good contrarian, by contrast, would have looked to see if it was already discussed, and if they still had a critique after reading the relevant discussion, they would have explained why the previous discussion was mistaken.
I wish that the better contrarians would post more often, and I wish that you would develop the habit of searching for past discussion before assuming that our ideas come from nowhere. And while I’m at it, I wish for a jetpack.
What wedrifid said- just because someone on Less Wrong got angry at a contrarian and called them something doesn’t mean Less Wrong holds them in low regard or ignores them.
Multifoliaterose angered a bunch of people (including me) with his early posts, because he thought he could show major logical flaws in reasoning he’d never encountered. But after a while, he settled down, understood what people were actually saying, and started writing criticisms that made sense to his intended audience. He is what I’d consider a good contrarian: I often end up disagreeing with his conclusions, but it’s worth my while to read his posts and re-think my own reasoning.
Robin Hanson is another good contrarian- although I can point to where I fundamentally disagree with him on the possibility of hard takeoff (and on many other things), I still read everything he posts because he often brings up ideas I wouldn’t have thought of myself.
Phil Goetz is kind of a special case: I find he has interesting things to say unless he’s talking about metaethics or decision theory.
One thing that these three have in common is that they read and understood the Sequences, so that they’re criticizing what Less Wrong contributors actually think rather than straw-man caricatures. By contrast, you wrote a post accusing us of failure to Taboo intelligence that shows complete ignorance of the fact that Eliezer explicitly did that in the Sequences. A good contrarian, by contrast, would have looked to see if it was already discussed, and if they still had a critique after reading the relevant discussion, they would have explained why the previous discussion was mistaken.
I wish that the better contrarians would post more often, and I wish that you would develop the habit of searching for past discussion before assuming that our ideas come from nowhere. And while I’m at it, I wish for a jetpack.