The Nonlinear Library LW - Losing Faith In Contrarianism by omnizoid
Apr 26, 2024
07:55
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Losing Faith In Contrarianism, published by omnizoid on April 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
Crosspost from my blog.
If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you'll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you'll probably have heard of
Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn't really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn't improve health, various people argue for the lab leak, others argue for hereditarianism, Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn't work, and various other people expressing contrarian views.
Often, very smart people - like Robin Hanson - will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don't really know what to think about them.
For a while, I took a lot of these contrarian views pretty seriously. If I'd had to bet 6-months ago, I'd have bet on the lab leak, at maybe 2 to 1 odds. I'd have had significant credence in Hanson's view that healthcare doesn't improve health until pretty recently, when Scott released his post explaining why it is wrong.
Over time, though, I've become much less sympathetic to these contrarian views. It's become increasingly obvious that the things that make them catch on are unrelated to their truth. People like being provocative and tearing down sacred cows - as a result, when a smart articulate person comes along defending some contrarian view - perhaps one claiming that something we think is valuable is really worthless - the view spreads like wildfire, even if it's pretty implausible.
Sam Atis has an article titled
The Case Against Public Intellectuals. He starts it by noting a surprising fact: lots of his friends think education has no benefits. This isn't because they've done a thorough investigation of the literature - it's because they've read Bryan Caplan's book arguing for that thesis. Atis notes that there's a literature review finding that education has significant benefits, yet it's written by boring academics, so no one has read it.
Everyone wants to read the contrarians who criticize education - no one wants to read the boring lit reviews that say what we believed about education all along is right.
Sam is right, yet I think he understates the problem. There are various topics where arguing for one side of them is inherently interesting, yet arguing for the other side is boring. There are a lot of people who read Austian economics blogs, yet no one reads (or writes) anti-Austrian economics blogs. That's because there are a lot of fans of Austrians economics - people who are willing to read blogs on the subject - but almost no one who is really invested in Austrian economics being wrong.
So as a result, in general, the structural incentives of the blogosphere favor being a contrarian.
Thus, you should expect the sense of the debate you get, unless you peruse the academic literature in depth surrounding some topic, to be wildly skewed towards contrarian views. And I think this is exactly what we observe.
I've seen the contrarians be wrong over and over again - and this is what really made me lose faith in them. Whenever I looked more into a topic, whenever I got to the bottom of the full debate, it always seemed like the contrarian case fell apart.
It's easy for contrarians to portray their opponents as the kind of milquetoast bureaucrats who aren't very smart and follow the consensus just because it is the consensus. If Bryan Caplan has a disagreement with a random administrator, I trust that Bryan Caplan's probably right, because he's smarter and cares more about ideas.
But what I've come to realize is that the mainstream view that's supported by most of the academics tends to be supported by some r...
Crosspost from my blog.
If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you'll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you'll probably have heard of
Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn't really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn't improve health, various people argue for the lab leak, others argue for hereditarianism, Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn't work, and various other people expressing contrarian views.
Often, very smart people - like Robin Hanson - will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don't really know what to think about them.
For a while, I took a lot of these contrarian views pretty seriously. If I'd had to bet 6-months ago, I'd have bet on the lab leak, at maybe 2 to 1 odds. I'd have had significant credence in Hanson's view that healthcare doesn't improve health until pretty recently, when Scott released his post explaining why it is wrong.
Over time, though, I've become much less sympathetic to these contrarian views. It's become increasingly obvious that the things that make them catch on are unrelated to their truth. People like being provocative and tearing down sacred cows - as a result, when a smart articulate person comes along defending some contrarian view - perhaps one claiming that something we think is valuable is really worthless - the view spreads like wildfire, even if it's pretty implausible.
Sam Atis has an article titled
The Case Against Public Intellectuals. He starts it by noting a surprising fact: lots of his friends think education has no benefits. This isn't because they've done a thorough investigation of the literature - it's because they've read Bryan Caplan's book arguing for that thesis. Atis notes that there's a literature review finding that education has significant benefits, yet it's written by boring academics, so no one has read it.
Everyone wants to read the contrarians who criticize education - no one wants to read the boring lit reviews that say what we believed about education all along is right.
Sam is right, yet I think he understates the problem. There are various topics where arguing for one side of them is inherently interesting, yet arguing for the other side is boring. There are a lot of people who read Austian economics blogs, yet no one reads (or writes) anti-Austrian economics blogs. That's because there are a lot of fans of Austrians economics - people who are willing to read blogs on the subject - but almost no one who is really invested in Austrian economics being wrong.
So as a result, in general, the structural incentives of the blogosphere favor being a contrarian.
Thus, you should expect the sense of the debate you get, unless you peruse the academic literature in depth surrounding some topic, to be wildly skewed towards contrarian views. And I think this is exactly what we observe.
I've seen the contrarians be wrong over and over again - and this is what really made me lose faith in them. Whenever I looked more into a topic, whenever I got to the bottom of the full debate, it always seemed like the contrarian case fell apart.
It's easy for contrarians to portray their opponents as the kind of milquetoast bureaucrats who aren't very smart and follow the consensus just because it is the consensus. If Bryan Caplan has a disagreement with a random administrator, I trust that Bryan Caplan's probably right, because he's smarter and cares more about ideas.
But what I've come to realize is that the mainstream view that's supported by most of the academics tends to be supported by some r...