I’m a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn’t novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn’t convey information, I can’t see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn’t be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it’s controversy.
In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.
Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between “all sex is rape” and “pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon” in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.
Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that’s further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it’s real Laius, socialism.
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the “straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority” variety, give us a bit of pause. If there’s any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.
On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I’d like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also...give us a bit of pause.
Actually, that move is perfectly consistent with real skepticism applied to a complex assertion.
To see why, let’s consider a different argument. Suppose a True Believer says we should punish gays or disallow gay marriage “because God hates homosexuality”. You and I are skeptical that this assertion is rationally defensible so we attack it at what seems like the obvious first link in the logical chain. We say “I doubt that god exists. Prove to me that god exists, and then maybe we’ll consider your argument.” At this point you can divide the positions into:
“god hates X”/god doesn’t exist
Now let us suppose TB actually does it. He does prove that god exists. Does this mean that we skeptics immediately have to accept his entire chain of reasoning? Of course not! We jump to the next weak link. To establish the original claim, one would need to prove god exists and is benevolent and wrote the bible and meant those passages in the way TB interprets as applied to our current situation. Anything less, and the original assertion remains Not Proven.
If any link in the chain fails, we don’t have to accept the compound assertion “God hates X, therefore we should do Y”. We can reasonably express skepticism towards any link that hasn’t been proven until the whole chain is sound. Right?
Now returning to global warming, the larger claim that is implied by saying things like “global warming is real” is “greenhouse gases are warming the globe; this process will cause net-bad outcomes if we do nothing and net-less-bad outcomes (including all costs and opportunity costs) if we do X, therefore we should do X”. The skeptical position is that not all the links in that chain of reasoning are strong and the warmists need to solidify a few weak links. I don’t see how disagreeing over which link in the logical chain is weakest or focusing on the next weak link when one formerly-weak link is strengthened constitutes “sophisticated apologetics”. I would have rather called it “rationalism”.
This is a great point that’s making me revise my position on some right wing commentators. Still, I’m struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action: we don’t actually tell religious people who believe wrong things “well god ain’t real deal with it”. We point out how their assertions are incompatible with their own teachings, and with the legal system, and scientific findings etc. We don’t keep all the flaws we see in their position back in reserve.
Moreover most of the serious commentators on the skeptical side of the issue argued only one of the points in question, whether it was the statistics showing warming or the economics implied by it or (cue rim-shot) sunspots, it’s only journalists and politicians who skipped from one to the other, which is where I got the impression they’d only looked at the issue long enough to find a contrarian position.
I’m struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action
If you’ve ever said or thought “Okay, just for the sake of argument, I’ll assume your point X is correct...” you were holding a position back in reserve.
One typical example is arguing with a religious nut that what he’s saying is incompatible with the teachings in his own holy book. Suppose he wins this argument (unlikely, I know, but bear with me...) and demonstrates that you were mistaken and no, his holy book really does teach that we should burn scientists as witches. Do you immediately conclude that yes, we should burn scientists as witches? No, because you don’t actually hold in high esteem the teachings in his holy book.
Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
However, it seems to me that such mainstream does exist. Compared to the overall range of ideas that have been held throughout the history of humanity, and even the overall range of ideas that I believe people could hold without being crazy or monstrous, the range acceptable in today’s mainstream discourse looks awfully narrow to me. It also seems to me very narrow by historical standards—for example, when I look at the 19th century books I’ve read, I see an immensely greater diversity of ideas than one can see from the modern authors that occupy a comparable mainstream range. (This of course doesn’t apply to hard sciences, in which the accumulation of knowledge has a monotonous upward trend.)
Of course, like every human society, ours is also shaken by passionate controversies. However, most of those that I observe in practice are between currents that are overall very similar from a broader perspective.
Well I can see that in certain areas, but it depends on where you look. The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago. The range of opinions on the morality of war is far narrower.
In any case, I meant mainstream in the sense that top 40 is mainstream, not in the sense that music is mainstream. Perhaps orthodoxy would be a better word? In fashion there is usually a single current orthodoxy about how people should dress, so it’s easy to identify these circles of heterodoxy and reactionism. Other issues show multiple competing orthodoxies, each of which appears contrary to the other.
The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago.
Frankly, I disagree with that statement so deeply that I’m at a loss how to even begin my response to it. Either we’re using radically different measures of breadth, or one (or both?) of us has had a grossly inadequate and unrepresentative exposure to the thought of each of these epochs.
Yes, certain ideas that were in the minority back then have been greatly popularized and elaborated in the meantime, and one could arguably even find an occasional original perspective developed since then. However, it seems evident to me that by any reasonable measure, this effect has been completely overshadowed by the sheer range of perspectives that have been ostracized from the respectable mainstream during the same period, or even vanished altogether.
In fashion there is usually a single current orthodoxy about how people should dress, so it’s easy to identify these circles of heterodoxy and reactionism. Other issues show multiple competing orthodoxies, each of which appears contrary to the other.
But in the matters of opinion, there is also a clearly defined—and, as I’ve argued, nowadays quite narrow—range of orthodoxy, and it’s common knowledge which opinions will be perceived as contrarian and controversial (if they push the envelope) or extremist and altogether disreputable (if they reach completely outside of it). I honestly don’t see on what basis you could possibly argue that the orthodoxy of fashion is nowadays stricter and tighter than the orthodoxy of opinion.
The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago.
Frankly, I disagree with that statement so deeply that I’m at a loss how to even begin my response to it. Either we’re using radically different measures of breadth, or one (or both?) of us has had a grossly inadequate and unrepresentative exposure to the thought of each of these epochs.
Two hundred years ago, the institutions were very different, and there was much less total intellectual output than a century ago, so it’s much harder to do a fair comparison because it’s less clear what counts as mainstream and significant.
However, the claim is still flat false at least when it comes to criminal punishment. In fact, in the history of the Western world, the period of roughly two hundred years ago was probably the very pinnacle of the diversity of views on legal punishment. On the one extreme, one could still find prominent advocates of brutal torturous execution methods like the breaking wheel (which were occasionally used in some parts of Europe well into the 19th century), and on the other, out-and-out death penalty abolitionists. (For example, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty altogether in 1786, and it was abolished almost completely in Russia around the mid-18th century.) One could also find all sorts of in-between views on all sides, of course. Admittedly, one would be hard-pressed to find someone advocating a prison system of the sort that exists nowadays, but that would have been economically impossible back in those far poorer times (modern prisons cost tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner-year, not even counting the cost of building them).
Depending on what exactly is meant by “the nature and the contents of history,” one could certainly point out many interesting perspectives that could be found 200 years ago, but not today anymore. That, however, is a very complex question. As for gender, well, I’d better not go into that topic. I’ll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it’s very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.
As for gender, well, I’d better not go into that topic. I’ll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it’s very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.
Dawn of history? Now I’m imagining uncovering writing on the wall of caves: “Why women make better hunters” and expressing indignation at under-representation of females in cave paintings of battles.
No I’m not. The counterfactual referred to writing, writing which incidentally happened to be a commentary on the quality of the historical record keeping. (It is not my position that the counterfactual is particularly likely—if anything the reverse.)
People still argue those things nowadays though. Any remotely salacious criminal story has hacks crawling out of the woodwork to gloat about how the perpetrators will be raped, and the current Attorney General has deliberately delayed introduction of mechanisms to clamp down on the practice. For a long time one of the most popular proposal out of Britain’s “let the public suggest policies” initiative was to send paedophiles to Iraq as human mine detectors.
And you’re missing the major reason for the increase in variety of criminal punishments, which is that the increase in the number of non violent crimes. I don’t think I’ll run too much risk of embarrassing myself if I suggest that mephedrone clinics weren’t considered an alternative to jail time 100 years ago.
As to gender, I was under the impression that radically post- and anti- gender views like those expressed by Julie Bindel and Donna Harroway were novel, if there are 19th century author’s with similar viewpoints I’d be happy to hear them. Again this is an issue where I don’t see any dead viewpoints, so even small increases in radical-ness increase the general width of ideas held.
It strikes me though from the prison issue that our differences are mostly over what qualifies a belief as respectable. There are many beliefs that are no longer taken seriously by liberal academics, if that’s what you mean by mainstream then I agree the 19th century showed a much broader range of opinion then ours.
Getting back to my original point, just about everything in the OP is within the range of orthodoxy of public opinion, and everything except “obama is a muslim” within the academic one, and yet they can be modeled as contrary to one another.
I’m a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn’t novel.
You’re right, the examples were pretty cherry-picked.
My point was to show that, although we tend to celebrate our failure to be lured into holding contrarian positions for the sake of contrarianism, this can itself be a trap that we need to watch out for. I think the idea of meta-contrarian-ness is novel in a way the idea of contrarian-ness is not.
Why do you want to define “genuine meta-contrarianness” based on correctness/merit? It will cause endless flamewars. Yvain’s recipe, on the other hand, is relatively uncontroversial.
As far as I can see, it’s uncontroversial because it doesn’t add any information in the first place, compared to just including the norm in question when describing something as contrarian, which takes a similar number of words, less effort and is less subjective.
But I’m not suggesting double contrarian opinions must be better than unrecontructed ones, rather that if they are distinguishable they should have different bottom lines: they shouldn’t just be better arguments for the same thing. We see this in the race example: modern genetics recognises very different ethnic distributions to those of classical racialist science, or modern derivations thereof.
I think the post was a guideline to help you catch yourself when you write the bottom line of your position for signaling reasons (contrarian or meta-contrarian). If you never experience that problem, more power to you. I do have it and the post was helpful to me.
Hah, I’m sure I do, I guess the point then is that just because your position is counter-revolutionary, doesn’t mean you haven’t adopted it out of rebelliousness. Um, assuming that revolutionary zeal as a potential source of bottom lines was taken for granted. I think I knew that already, if only through hatred of South Park style antagonistic third way-ism, and so have spent these last few responses training on straw.
I’m a little confused, what purpose does this distinction serve? That people like to define their opinions as a rebellion against received opinion isn’t novel. What you seem to be saying is: defining yourself against an opinion which is seen as contrarian sends a reliably different social signal to defining yourself against an opinion which is mainstream, is that a fair assessment? Because this only works if there is a singular, visible mainstream, which is obviously available in fashion but rare in the realm of ideas.
Moreover, if order-of-contrariness doesn’t convey information, I can’t see any situation in which one it would be helpful to indicate a positions order, where it wouldn’t be just as easy and far more informative to point out the specific chain of it’s controversy.
In any case I take some issue with a bunch of your example.
Firstly on feminism the obvious mainstream controversy/metacontroversy dynamic for misogyny is between second and third wave feminism in academia, and between “all sex is rape” and “pole dancing is empowering/Madonna is a feminist icon” in the media. Picking an obscure internet phenomenon closer to the starting point is blatant cherry picking.
Similarly the Bad Samaritans/New Development argument has a lot more currency than the aid is the problem one, but again that’s further from both positions. For that matter the same applies to liberterianism and it’s real Laius, socialism.
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from “it’s not happening” to “well we didn’t do it” to “well we can’t do anything about it without doing more harm than good” should also, combined with the overlap in arguments between self identified MRAs and younger misogynists of the “straight white christian men are the most oppressed minority” variety, give us a bit of pause. If there’s any use to identifying meta contrarian positions, it has to be in distinguishing between genuine attempts to correct falsehoods made in overeager argument with the old mainstream, and sophisticated apologetics for previously exploded positions.
On second thought, convincing as I find the Stern report, enough economists argued against reducing carbon emissions on cost-benefit grounds from the beginning that the meta position deserves honest consideration. I’d like to propose instead deism as the canonical example for bad faith apologia in meta-contrarianist drag, and third wave feminism for the honest position. Is this suitably uncontroversial?
Actually, that move is perfectly consistent with real skepticism applied to a complex assertion.
To see why, let’s consider a different argument. Suppose a True Believer says we should punish gays or disallow gay marriage “because God hates homosexuality”. You and I are skeptical that this assertion is rationally defensible so we attack it at what seems like the obvious first link in the logical chain. We say “I doubt that god exists. Prove to me that god exists, and then maybe we’ll consider your argument.” At this point you can divide the positions into:
“god hates X”/god doesn’t exist
Now let us suppose TB actually does it. He does prove that god exists. Does this mean that we skeptics immediately have to accept his entire chain of reasoning? Of course not! We jump to the next weak link. To establish the original claim, one would need to prove god exists and is benevolent and wrote the bible and meant those passages in the way TB interprets as applied to our current situation. Anything less, and the original assertion remains Not Proven.
If any link in the chain fails, we don’t have to accept the compound assertion “God hates X, therefore we should do Y”. We can reasonably express skepticism towards any link that hasn’t been proven until the whole chain is sound. Right?
Now returning to global warming, the larger claim that is implied by saying things like “global warming is real” is “greenhouse gases are warming the globe; this process will cause net-bad outcomes if we do nothing and net-less-bad outcomes (including all costs and opportunity costs) if we do X, therefore we should do X”. The skeptical position is that not all the links in that chain of reasoning are strong and the warmists need to solidify a few weak links. I don’t see how disagreeing over which link in the logical chain is weakest or focusing on the next weak link when one formerly-weak link is strengthened constitutes “sophisticated apologetics”. I would have rather called it “rationalism”.
This is a great point that’s making me revise my position on some right wing commentators. Still, I’m struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action: we don’t actually tell religious people who believe wrong things “well god ain’t real deal with it”. We point out how their assertions are incompatible with their own teachings, and with the legal system, and scientific findings etc. We don’t keep all the flaws we see in their position back in reserve.
Moreover most of the serious commentators on the skeptical side of the issue argued only one of the points in question, whether it was the statistics showing warming or the economics implied by it or (cue rim-shot) sunspots, it’s only journalists and politicians who skipped from one to the other, which is where I got the impression they’d only looked at the issue long enough to find a contrarian position.
If you’ve ever said or thought “Okay, just for the sake of argument, I’ll assume your point X is correct...” you were holding a position back in reserve.
One typical example is arguing with a religious nut that what he’s saying is incompatible with the teachings in his own holy book. Suppose he wins this argument (unlikely, I know, but bear with me...) and demonstrates that you were mistaken and no, his holy book really does teach that we should burn scientists as witches. Do you immediately conclude that yes, we should burn scientists as witches? No, because you don’t actually hold in high esteem the teachings in his holy book.
Mercy:
However, it seems to me that such mainstream does exist. Compared to the overall range of ideas that have been held throughout the history of humanity, and even the overall range of ideas that I believe people could hold without being crazy or monstrous, the range acceptable in today’s mainstream discourse looks awfully narrow to me. It also seems to me very narrow by historical standards—for example, when I look at the 19th century books I’ve read, I see an immensely greater diversity of ideas than one can see from the modern authors that occupy a comparable mainstream range. (This of course doesn’t apply to hard sciences, in which the accumulation of knowledge has a monotonous upward trend.)
Of course, like every human society, ours is also shaken by passionate controversies. However, most of those that I observe in practice are between currents that are overall very similar from a broader perspective.
Well I can see that in certain areas, but it depends on where you look. The range of held opinions on the construction of gender, criminal punishment and both the nature and the contents of history is much broader than one hundred years ago. The range of opinions on the morality of war is far narrower.
In any case, I meant mainstream in the sense that top 40 is mainstream, not in the sense that music is mainstream. Perhaps orthodoxy would be a better word? In fashion there is usually a single current orthodoxy about how people should dress, so it’s easy to identify these circles of heterodoxy and reactionism. Other issues show multiple competing orthodoxies, each of which appears contrary to the other.
Mercy:
Frankly, I disagree with that statement so deeply that I’m at a loss how to even begin my response to it. Either we’re using radically different measures of breadth, or one (or both?) of us has had a grossly inadequate and unrepresentative exposure to the thought of each of these epochs.
Yes, certain ideas that were in the minority back then have been greatly popularized and elaborated in the meantime, and one could arguably even find an occasional original perspective developed since then. However, it seems evident to me that by any reasonable measure, this effect has been completely overshadowed by the sheer range of perspectives that have been ostracized from the respectable mainstream during the same period, or even vanished altogether.
But in the matters of opinion, there is also a clearly defined—and, as I’ve argued, nowadays quite narrow—range of orthodoxy, and it’s common knowledge which opinions will be perceived as contrarian and controversial (if they push the envelope) or extremist and altogether disreputable (if they reach completely outside of it). I honestly don’t see on what basis you could possibly argue that the orthodoxy of fashion is nowadays stricter and tighter than the orthodoxy of opinion.
Two hundred years ago, then?
Two hundred years ago, the institutions were very different, and there was much less total intellectual output than a century ago, so it’s much harder to do a fair comparison because it’s less clear what counts as mainstream and significant.
However, the claim is still flat false at least when it comes to criminal punishment. In fact, in the history of the Western world, the period of roughly two hundred years ago was probably the very pinnacle of the diversity of views on legal punishment. On the one extreme, one could still find prominent advocates of brutal torturous execution methods like the breaking wheel (which were occasionally used in some parts of Europe well into the 19th century), and on the other, out-and-out death penalty abolitionists. (For example, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty altogether in 1786, and it was abolished almost completely in Russia around the mid-18th century.) One could also find all sorts of in-between views on all sides, of course. Admittedly, one would be hard-pressed to find someone advocating a prison system of the sort that exists nowadays, but that would have been economically impossible back in those far poorer times (modern prisons cost tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner-year, not even counting the cost of building them).
Depending on what exactly is meant by “the nature and the contents of history,” one could certainly point out many interesting perspectives that could be found 200 years ago, but not today anymore. That, however, is a very complex question. As for gender, well, I’d better not go into that topic. I’ll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it’s very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.
Dawn of history? Now I’m imagining uncovering writing on the wall of caves: “Why women make better hunters” and expressing indignation at under-representation of females in cave paintings of battles.
What Constant said. I meant “history” in the narrow technical sense of the word, i.e. the period since the invention of writing.
You’re mixing up history with prehistory.
No I’m not. The counterfactual referred to writing, writing which incidentally happened to be a commentary on the quality of the historical record keeping. (It is not my position that the counterfactual is particularly likely—if anything the reverse.)
People still argue those things nowadays though. Any remotely salacious criminal story has hacks crawling out of the woodwork to gloat about how the perpetrators will be raped, and the current Attorney General has deliberately delayed introduction of mechanisms to clamp down on the practice. For a long time one of the most popular proposal out of Britain’s “let the public suggest policies” initiative was to send paedophiles to Iraq as human mine detectors.
And you’re missing the major reason for the increase in variety of criminal punishments, which is that the increase in the number of non violent crimes. I don’t think I’ll run too much risk of embarrassing myself if I suggest that mephedrone clinics weren’t considered an alternative to jail time 100 years ago.
As to gender, I was under the impression that radically post- and anti- gender views like those expressed by Julie Bindel and Donna Harroway were novel, if there are 19th century author’s with similar viewpoints I’d be happy to hear them. Again this is an issue where I don’t see any dead viewpoints, so even small increases in radical-ness increase the general width of ideas held.
It strikes me though from the prison issue that our differences are mostly over what qualifies a belief as respectable. There are many beliefs that are no longer taken seriously by liberal academics, if that’s what you mean by mainstream then I agree the 19th century showed a much broader range of opinion then ours.
Getting back to my original point, just about everything in the OP is within the range of orthodoxy of public opinion, and everything except “obama is a muslim” within the academic one, and yet they can be modeled as contrary to one another.
Mephedrone clinics? Do you mean methadone clinics?
You’re right, the examples were pretty cherry-picked.
My point was to show that, although we tend to celebrate our failure to be lured into holding contrarian positions for the sake of contrarianism, this can itself be a trap that we need to watch out for. I think the idea of meta-contrarian-ness is novel in a way the idea of contrarian-ness is not.
Why do you want to define “genuine meta-contrarianness” based on correctness/merit? It will cause endless flamewars. Yvain’s recipe, on the other hand, is relatively uncontroversial.
As far as I can see, it’s uncontroversial because it doesn’t add any information in the first place, compared to just including the norm in question when describing something as contrarian, which takes a similar number of words, less effort and is less subjective.
But I’m not suggesting double contrarian opinions must be better than unrecontructed ones, rather that if they are distinguishable they should have different bottom lines: they shouldn’t just be better arguments for the same thing. We see this in the race example: modern genetics recognises very different ethnic distributions to those of classical racialist science, or modern derivations thereof.
I think the post was a guideline to help you catch yourself when you write the bottom line of your position for signaling reasons (contrarian or meta-contrarian). If you never experience that problem, more power to you. I do have it and the post was helpful to me.
Hah, I’m sure I do, I guess the point then is that just because your position is counter-revolutionary, doesn’t mean you haven’t adopted it out of rebelliousness. Um, assuming that revolutionary zeal as a potential source of bottom lines was taken for granted. I think I knew that already, if only through hatred of South Park style antagonistic third way-ism, and so have spent these last few responses training on straw.