I disagree, I think this community in particular has a contrarian bias, probably as a result of the ties to the Rationalist community. A lot of people are here for the fun of discussion, and it is way more interesting to debate and discuss wacky and strange ideas than it is to go over the minutae of the most efficient malaria nets or whatever. Unfortunately, most of the time the boring, mainstream take also happens to be the true one.
My sense is if you look at “wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians” as a historical reference class, they’ve been important enough to be worth paying attention to. I would put pre-WWW discussion & exploration of hypermedia in this category, for instance. And the first wiki was a rather wacky and strange thing. I think you could argue that the big ideas underpinning EA (RCTs, veganism, existential risk) were all once wacky and strange. (Existential risk was certainly wacky and strange about 10-15 years ago.)
I think it’s good to discuss wacky and strange ideas, because on the occasions where they actually are true, it can lead to great things. A lot of great movements and foundations are built on disruptive ideas that were strange at the time but obvious in retrospect.
However, that doesn’t really change my point that usually the reason a new idea seems wacky and strange is because it’s wrong. And if you glorify the rare victories too much, you might start forgetting the many, many failures, leading towards a bias for accepting ideas that are somewhat half-baked.
However, that doesn’t really change my point that usually the reason a new idea seems wacky and strange is because it’s wrong.
I think seeming wacky and strange is mainly a function of difference, not wrongness per se.
I’d argue that the best way to evaluate the merits of a wacky idea is usually to consider it directly. And discussing wacky ideas is what brings them from half-baked to fully-baked.
If you can find a good way to count up the historical reference class of “wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians” and quantify the percentage of such ideas which were verifiable duds, I’d be very interested to see that post. (The “highly educated” part is doing a lot of work here btw—I know there’s a lot of random occult type stuff that never goes anywhere.) I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere talking about biases—my view is that people arebiased in the other direction! (Maybe that’s the correct bias to have if you aren’t experienced in the ways of highly educated contrarianism, though.)
wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians
I mean, we can start with this list here. I guarantee you there are highly educated people who buy into pretty much every conspiracy on that list. It’s not at all hard to find, for example, engineers who think 9/11 was an inside job. Ted kascynski was a mathematics professor, etc, you get the point.
The list of possible wrong beliefs outnumbers the list of possible correct beliefs by many orders of magnitude. That stands for status quo opinions as well, but they have the advantage of withstanding challenges and holding for a longer period of time. That’s the reason that if someone claims they’ve come up with a free energy machine, it’s okay to dismiss them, unless you’re feeling really bored that day.
Now, EA is exploring status quo ideas that are much less tested and firm that physics, so finding holes is much easier and worthwhile, and so I agree that strange ideas are worth considering. But most of them are still gonna be wrong, because they are untested.
EA is built on a foundation of rejecting the status quo. EA might only do that in places where the status quo is woefully inadequate of false in some way, but the status quo is still the status quo and it will strike back at people who challenge it.
The phenomenon described above is a side effect of optimization, not “contrarian bias”. Contrarian bias is also a problem that many people in EA and especially rationalists have, but the only common factor is that there aren’t the kind of people who assume that everything is all right and go along with it.
I disagree with your disagreement of my disagreement!
The foundation of EA is (or at least should be), finding the truth. We should only reject the status quo if the status quo is wrong.
I don’t have a problem with EA trying out hot takes and contrarian ideas, because finding cases where the status quo is genuinely wrong is valuable and gives a large competitive advantage. But I think this very fact leads to a bias towards accepting such ideas, even if they are not strictly true.
Unfortunately, most of the time the boring, mainstream take also happens to be the true one.
This is actually true, to a first approximation. Yet on the rare times that the mainstream is wrong, it really matters, so a version of this post still stands, EV wise.
I disagree, I think this community in particular has a contrarian bias, probably as a result of the ties to the Rationalist community. A lot of people are here for the fun of discussion, and it is way more interesting to debate and discuss wacky and strange ideas than it is to go over the minutae of the most efficient malaria nets or whatever. Unfortunately, most of the time the boring, mainstream take also happens to be the true one.
My sense is if you look at “wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians” as a historical reference class, they’ve been important enough to be worth paying attention to. I would put pre-WWW discussion & exploration of hypermedia in this category, for instance. And the first wiki was a rather wacky and strange thing. I think you could argue that the big ideas underpinning EA (RCTs, veganism, existential risk) were all once wacky and strange. (Existential risk was certainly wacky and strange about 10-15 years ago.)
I think it’s good to discuss wacky and strange ideas, because on the occasions where they actually are true, it can lead to great things. A lot of great movements and foundations are built on disruptive ideas that were strange at the time but obvious in retrospect.
However, that doesn’t really change my point that usually the reason a new idea seems wacky and strange is because it’s wrong. And if you glorify the rare victories too much, you might start forgetting the many, many failures, leading towards a bias for accepting ideas that are somewhat half-baked.
I think seeming wacky and strange is mainly a function of difference, not wrongness per se.
I’d argue that the best way to evaluate the merits of a wacky idea is usually to consider it directly. And discussing wacky ideas is what brings them from half-baked to fully-baked.
If you can find a good way to count up the historical reference class of “wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians” and quantify the percentage of such ideas which were verifiable duds, I’d be very interested to see that post. (The “highly educated” part is doing a lot of work here btw—I know there’s a lot of random occult type stuff that never goes anywhere.) I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere talking about biases—my view is that people are biased in the other direction! (Maybe that’s the correct bias to have if you aren’t experienced in the ways of highly educated contrarianism, though.)
I mean, we can start with this list here. I guarantee you there are highly educated people who buy into pretty much every conspiracy on that list. It’s not at all hard to find, for example, engineers who think 9/11 was an inside job. Ted kascynski was a mathematics professor, etc, you get the point.
The list of possible wrong beliefs outnumbers the list of possible correct beliefs by many orders of magnitude. That stands for status quo opinions as well, but they have the advantage of withstanding challenges and holding for a longer period of time. That’s the reason that if someone claims they’ve come up with a free energy machine, it’s okay to dismiss them, unless you’re feeling really bored that day.
Now, EA is exploring status quo ideas that are much less tested and firm that physics, so finding holes is much easier and worthwhile, and so I agree that strange ideas are worth considering. But most of them are still gonna be wrong, because they are untested.
I disagree with this disagreement.
EA is built on a foundation of rejecting the status quo. EA might only do that in places where the status quo is woefully inadequate of false in some way, but the status quo is still the status quo and it will strike back at people who challenge it.
The phenomenon described above is a side effect of optimization, not “contrarian bias”. Contrarian bias is also a problem that many people in EA and especially rationalists have, but the only common factor is that there aren’t the kind of people who assume that everything is all right and go along with it.
I disagree with your disagreement of my disagreement!
The foundation of EA is (or at least should be), finding the truth. We should only reject the status quo if the status quo is wrong.
I don’t have a problem with EA trying out hot takes and contrarian ideas, because finding cases where the status quo is genuinely wrong is valuable and gives a large competitive advantage. But I think this very fact leads to a bias towards accepting such ideas, even if they are not strictly true.
This is actually true, to a first approximation. Yet on the rare times that the mainstream is wrong, it really matters, so a version of this post still stands, EV wise.