No way, I don’t buy this one at all. I find that most little kids are essentially naive liberals. We should give poor sick people free medicine! We should stop bad polluters from hurting birds and trees! Conservatism/libertarianism is the contrarian position. Everything has a cost! There are no free lunches! Managerial-technocratic liberals are the meta-contrarians. So what about the costs? We’ve got 800 of the smartest guys from Yarvard and Oxbridge to do cost-benefit analyses for us!
Of course there are meta-meta-contrarians as well: reactionaries, meta-libertarians (Patri Friedman is a good example of a metalibertarian IMO), anarchists, etc.
I was thinking more in terms of conservative values like “My country is the best” and “Our enemies are bad people who hate our freedom”, but your way makes a lot of sense too.
Although it’s worth noting that all of what you say is obvious even to little kids are things no one had even thought of a hundred years ago. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring are remembered as iconic because they kick-started an environmentalist movement that just didn’t really exist before the second half of the 20th century (although Thoureau and people like that get honorable mention). The idea of rich people paying to give poor sick people free medicine would have gotten you laughed out of most socially stratified civilizations on the wrong side of about 1850.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in which side is more contrarian, because it sounds too close to arguing whether liberalism or conservativism is better, which of course would be a terribly low status thing to do on a site like this :)
I think it was probably a mistake to include such large-scale politics on there at all. Whether a political position seems natural or contrarian depends on what social context someone’s in, what age they are, and what the particular issue involved is.
What about this: moderately smart teenagers become extreme liberals to be contrary to the conservative ideals of their elders; excessively smart teenagers become extreme libertarians to be contrary to moderately smart teenagers and their elders, and older people become conservative (or moderate liberals) to signal they’re not teenagers :)
I think you’re right about the chronological sequence of kids as “naive liberals” to adults as conservative (more so than the kids, anyway), but not about the rationale. Positioning oneself on the contrarian hierarchy is about showing off that your intellect is greater than the people below you on it. It’s the rare adult who feels a need to explicitly demonstrate their intellectual superiority to children—but the common adult who has a job and pays taxes and actually ever thinks about the cost of things, as opposed to the kids, who don’t need to.
In short, adults don’t oppose free medicine etc. to be contrary to the position of naive children; they oppose it because they’re the ones who’d have to pay for it.
I think the takeaway from this is just that classification of phenomena into these triads is a very subjective business. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the point of this (if I’m reading Yvain correctly) is not to determine the correctness of a position by its position in a triad, but simply to encourage people to notice when their own thinking is motivated by a desire to climb the triad, rather than pursue truth, and to be skeptical of yourself when you detect yourself trying to triad-climb.
Ah thanks that position makes more sense to me now, you mean what most people call social democracy, not liberalism as it is understood outside the US? Because at least in britain, libertarian’s align with liberals/conservatives against socialists and social democrats.
But to be honest, they are a good example of a flaw in the setup, which is that people tend to define themselves against imaginary enemies that believe everything they do only backwards, rather than naively dispute everything their enemy says. So libertarians are more likely to complain about “statists”, than come out in favour of taxes or wars because socialists are against them.
No way, I don’t buy this one at all. I find that most little kids are essentially naive liberals. We should give poor sick people free medicine! We should stop bad polluters from hurting birds and trees! Conservatism/libertarianism is the contrarian position. Everything has a cost! There are no free lunches! Managerial-technocratic liberals are the meta-contrarians. So what about the costs? We’ve got 800 of the smartest guys from Yarvard and Oxbridge to do cost-benefit analyses for us!
Of course there are meta-meta-contrarians as well: reactionaries, meta-libertarians (Patri Friedman is a good example of a metalibertarian IMO), anarchists, etc.
It’s contrarians all the way down.
I was thinking more in terms of conservative values like “My country is the best” and “Our enemies are bad people who hate our freedom”, but your way makes a lot of sense too.
Although it’s worth noting that all of what you say is obvious even to little kids are things no one had even thought of a hundred years ago. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring are remembered as iconic because they kick-started an environmentalist movement that just didn’t really exist before the second half of the 20th century (although Thoureau and people like that get honorable mention). The idea of rich people paying to give poor sick people free medicine would have gotten you laughed out of most socially stratified civilizations on the wrong side of about 1850.
But I don’t want to get too bogged down in which side is more contrarian, because it sounds too close to arguing whether liberalism or conservativism is better, which of course would be a terribly low status thing to do on a site like this :)
I think it was probably a mistake to include such large-scale politics on there at all. Whether a political position seems natural or contrarian depends on what social context someone’s in, what age they are, and what the particular issue involved is.
What about this: moderately smart teenagers become extreme liberals to be contrary to the conservative ideals of their elders; excessively smart teenagers become extreme libertarians to be contrary to moderately smart teenagers and their elders, and older people become conservative (or moderate liberals) to signal they’re not teenagers :)
I think you’re right about the chronological sequence of kids as “naive liberals” to adults as conservative (more so than the kids, anyway), but not about the rationale. Positioning oneself on the contrarian hierarchy is about showing off that your intellect is greater than the people below you on it. It’s the rare adult who feels a need to explicitly demonstrate their intellectual superiority to children—but the common adult who has a job and pays taxes and actually ever thinks about the cost of things, as opposed to the kids, who don’t need to.
In short, adults don’t oppose free medicine etc. to be contrary to the position of naive children; they oppose it because they’re the ones who’d have to pay for it.
I think the takeaway from this is just that classification of phenomena into these triads is a very subjective business. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the point of this (if I’m reading Yvain correctly) is not to determine the correctness of a position by its position in a triad, but simply to encourage people to notice when their own thinking is motivated by a desire to climb the triad, rather than pursue truth, and to be skeptical of yourself when you detect yourself trying to triad-climb.
Ah thanks that position makes more sense to me now, you mean what most people call social democracy, not liberalism as it is understood outside the US? Because at least in britain, libertarian’s align with liberals/conservatives against socialists and social democrats.
But to be honest, they are a good example of a flaw in the setup, which is that people tend to define themselves against imaginary enemies that believe everything they do only backwards, rather than naively dispute everything their enemy says. So libertarians are more likely to complain about “statists”, than come out in favour of taxes or wars because socialists are against them.