Meta-comment for authors: take some time after each post to update on how actually contrarian your positions are. As far as I can tell the response to Jordan Peterson on LessWrong has been uniformly positive.
I sense that there are a lot of reasonable people with good ideas like yourself who feel reluctant to share “controversial” views (on e.g. fuzzy System 1 stuff) because they feel like embattled contrarians. Of course, this is probably correct in whatever other social sphere you get your training data from. However, the whole “please be reasonable and charitable to these views” disclaimer gets old fast if people have been receiving similarviewswell in the past.
tl;dr: on LessWrong, you are probably less contrarian than you think.
I’ve gotten a much more negative reception to fuzzy System 1 stuff at IRL LW meetups than online—that could be what’s going on there.
And it’s possible for negative reception to be more psychologically impactful and less visible to outsiders than positive reception. This seems especially likely for culture war-adjacent topics like Jordan Peterson. Even if the reception is broadly positive, there might still be a few people who have very negative reactions.
(This is why I’m reluctant to participate in the public-facing community nowadays—there were a few people in the rationalist community who had very negative reactions to things I said, and did things like track me down on Facebook and leave me profanity-laden messages, or try to hound me out of all the circles they had access to. With a year or two of hindsight, I can see that those people were a small minority and this wasn’t a generally negative reaction. But it sure felt like one at the time.)
I just want to make it clear that sending other users on the page insulting or threatening messages is not cool, and that if anyone else ever experiences that, please reach out to me and I will be able to give you a bit of perspective and potentially take action against the person sending the messages (if they’ve done that repeatedly).
I don’t have a positive reaction to Jordan Peterson—I wouldn’t call liking him contrarian, but it’s at least controversial. To me, he just seems like a self-help media personality shaped by slightly different selection pressure.
Meta-comment for authors: take some time after each post to update on how actually contrarian your positions are. As far as I can tell the response to Jordan Peterson on LessWrong has been uniformly positive.
I sense that there are a lot of reasonable people with good ideas like yourself who feel reluctant to share “controversial” views (on e.g. fuzzy System 1 stuff) because they feel like embattled contrarians. Of course, this is probably correct in whatever other social sphere you get your training data from. However, the whole “please be reasonable and charitable to these views” disclaimer gets old fast if people have been receiving similar views well in the past.
tl;dr: on LessWrong, you are probably less contrarian than you think.
I’ve gotten a much more negative reception to fuzzy System 1 stuff at IRL LW meetups than online—that could be what’s going on there.
And it’s possible for negative reception to be more psychologically impactful and less visible to outsiders than positive reception. This seems especially likely for culture war-adjacent topics like Jordan Peterson. Even if the reception is broadly positive, there might still be a few people who have very negative reactions.
(This is why I’m reluctant to participate in the public-facing community nowadays—there were a few people in the rationalist community who had very negative reactions to things I said, and did things like track me down on Facebook and leave me profanity-laden messages, or try to hound me out of all the circles they had access to. With a year or two of hindsight, I can see that those people were a small minority and this wasn’t a generally negative reaction. But it sure felt like one at the time.)
I just want to make it clear that sending other users on the page insulting or threatening messages is not cool, and that if anyone else ever experiences that, please reach out to me and I will be able to give you a bit of perspective and potentially take action against the person sending the messages (if they’ve done that repeatedly).
I don’t have a positive reaction to Jordan Peterson—I wouldn’t call liking him contrarian, but it’s at least controversial. To me, he just seems like a self-help media personality shaped by slightly different selection pressure.
Jordan Peterson is controversial, but “controversial” is an interesting word. Is Paul Krugman controversial?