Intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarians

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metacontrarianism/

by j_baker • 16 years ago

188 135 16 years ago

_delirium2• 16 years ago

It's an interesting problem, because there is some benefit in intellectual areas to not over-signalling "intelligence", imo. Nobody likes the hipster, but nobody really likes the insecure mid-level intellectual who goes out of his way to speak like a thesaurus, either (the intellectual equivalent of buying too much jewelry). Seems tricky to find exactly the right balance!

lotusleaf19872• 16 years ago

I always think the best speakers are those who use clear, concise, and easily understood language. There is no sense in trying to confuse your audience or show off how obscure your vocabulary is. That is why I always preferred Hemingway or Steinbeck to Fitzgerald or Joyce.

celoyd2• 16 years ago

I think that’s good as a rule, but I’m not sure it holds for cases like Joyce. If you want to write a book that has to do with how experience is translated into language and vice-versa, transparent language might not be best. Sometimes confusion can be a very deliberate and controlled effect, like in David Foster Wallace (who’s also on the front page today).

Just like Picasso could draw a realistic portrait when he wanted, Joyce sometimes used very simple and conservative prose. But I would agree that most people who use long words (like most people who use more than one perspective per painting) shouldn’t.

apu• 16 years ago

What's with the weird misspellings/typos all over the place? Like 'ey' for 'he', or 'eir' for 'their'?

j_baker2• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

anurag• 16 years ago

Isn't usage of Spivak pronouns itself a form of meta-contrarianism? (gender-biased / gender-neutral / Spivak)

saturn• 16 years ago

What's wrong with "it"? It's gender neutral. Life neutral, even, can't get more neutral than that.

narrator• 16 years ago

Well if you want to be a uber-meta-contrarian you learn the art and do your own research. Otherwise you're just repeating what someone else said who either did their own research, or pretended to in order support some pre-determined conclusion.

napierzaza• 16 years ago

This is what a lot of HN posts are about. Or is this exactly what HN posts are NOT about? I think so.

narkee• 16 years ago

Or you stop defining your beliefs based on the beliefs of others.

Problem solved.

sev• 16 years ago

"But why would being deliberately uncool be cooler than being cool?"

I think that's a wrong question to ask, because "hipsters" aren't being deliberately uncool.

A better question would be: "why is not following what the mainstream does cooler than following it?"

And the answer to that is simpler: because it shows a sense of leadership.

rdtsc• 16 years ago

I wonder how conscious is this process?

Do people really tell themselves things like "aha, I'll show them that I am rich buying something I don't need that's expensive" or does the desire to buy something extravagant and expensive just pop into their head out of nowhere and they are just compelled to do it.

Also, what is the strength of the desire to signal among all groups? Perhaps a poor person has a stronger desire to signal that they are rich than a rich person to signal that they are not poor. I think that's the second axis -- how much one signals.

If it is conscious, where does the refusal to signal fall into? Like the author mentions, it would seem that an intellectually honest person should rationally analyze themselves, and steer clear of this kind of trap.

Herring• 16 years ago

I've read only snippets of their articles on signalling, but I think it's mainly issues of self & identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences

nkurz5• 16 years ago

Different levels of behaviour are associated with different levels of consciousness. For your example of conspicuous consumption, all the crosses seem possible. In my social circles, I'd guess that in general the most common are to "buy unconsciously" and to "avoid consciously". It would probably depend on your specific example.

I wouldn't think of it as a trap, though. It's more of a situational awareness. People will react differently based on the signals you send. Is the trap to signal consciously or unconsciously? Because consciously not signalling might turn out to be the trap to avoid. But then again, so might any of the three other combinations

timinman2• 16 years ago

I read somewhere that hipsters almost universally deny being hipsters.

sethg2• 16 years ago

I assume it’s a process of “the people I hang out with, who are in my economic class, are all driving BMWs and Lexuses, and I feel silly parking my Subaru next to their cars”.

sesqu4• 16 years ago

Some of it is definitely conscious. In particular, a certain class of people "trying to break in" consciously spend above their means in order to be perceived as having the means. I have not encountered a whole lot of evidence that this works - I only know of it from the many cases where it didn't work, or worked just long enough to allow them to fail to express other qualities the "in" crowd has.

Similarly, a lot of the "new rich" commentary suggests a desire to flaunt success, Trump style, because the individual is acutely aware of how different their circumstances have become and wish to let others know they are no longer in their previous position. They are signalling that they have, in fact, "broken in".

However, the qualities they are signalling are generally not signalled by the natural members of the group, who merely express them. These members may unconsciously signal other things, such as slang.

In other words, those who are aware of different levels may signal a level consciously. Others will not, beyond expressing the qualities that define them as of the level. A curious person might be contrarian, while an experienced one could be simplistic. Here, the "above average" one will be expressing, while the "intelligent" one is applying and the pragmatic one would be signalling (authority). Conscious signals tend to be hollow by necessity, and targeted at a specific level.

araneae2• 16 years ago

Well, my beliefs are pretty meta-contrarian, and I think it stems from a desire to be different. So those old-rich may look at the new rich, feel disgusted that they may possibly be put in the same "bucket" as them, and try to find some way to distinguish themselves from them.

That's how I went from Democrat to Libertarian. And then Libertarian to libertarian. And then libertarian to ?.

If I were going to be less self-effacing, I could also say that any time my beliefs are held by a large number of people, I start to question them, because it's not possible for a large number of people to both agree and be perfectly correct...

jbooth2• 16 years ago

++ to you for the self-awareness. Personally I saw how libertarian arguments were just so fun to make and just so unworkable in any real world situation and skipped the whole trap, stayed a democrat. But I've made my own meta contrarian points (trying to tell my liberal friends that the iraq war was a good idea) and almost always been borne out wrong by reality.

Turns out if your motivations veers from "truth" to "it feels good to make this argument", you're gonna steer yourself wrong.

ibejoeb• 16 years ago

>In all three examples, people at the top of the pyramid end up displaying characteristics similar to those at the bottom. Hipsters deliberately wear the same clothes uncool people wear.

Hipsters are at the top of the fashion now? This is why I wear suits.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

But how do we know if you're wearing that suit ironically or not? ;-)

http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-cant-anyone-tell-im-wea...

metamemetics7• 16 years ago

The underlying assumption of this article every step of the way is that one's underlying motivation for argument, debate, or discussion is to signal social standing

I would argue instead that the most intelligent people find it innately enjoyable to talk about ideas. They are motivated by a desire to decrease-uncertainty and clarify-understanding.... they realize social standing is often an illusion and not overly worth worrying about.

ckuehne4• 16 years ago

There's no contradiction to your argument. I innately enjoy looking at beautiful women and eat delicious food without (always) being aware that the ultimate cause for the enjoyment is increase in genetic fitness.

Or more to the point: I innately enjoy winning games or working creatively just as the male bower bird [1] finds innate desire to build richly colored bowers to attract females.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird

Confusion5• 16 years ago

There is a contradiction, because the argument in the article assumes the signalling of social standing is THE reason for the behavior.

Opinions like

  A person who is somewhat intelligent will conspicuously
  signal eir intelligence by holding difficult-to-understand
  opinions. A person who is very intelligent will 
  conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to 
  conspicuously signal eir intelligence, by deliberately not 
  holding difficult-to-understand opinions.

are incredibly annoying. It's one of those opinions that are almost impossible to defend against or disprove, because of the vague nature of 'conspicuously' and 'difficult-to-understand'. Actually, I think you can attack it as form a meta-contrarianism itself: anti-intellectuals will hold the above opinion, intellectuals will denounce that opinion and meta-contrarians will claim that 'people cannot help but be influenced by concern for their social standing, so there is some truth in the assertions of anti-intellectuals that intellectuals show behavior which seems to be intended solely to make it harder for non-intellectuals to enter their field', which polarizes into the quoted opinion.

metamemetics7• 16 years ago

That's a pretty big non-sequitur, I think you're forgetting the context of the original article when interpreting my comment. I think confusion's clarification is very well-put.

iskander• 16 years ago

>the ultimate cause for the enjoyment is increase in genetic fitness

Falsifiable claims, please.

JoachimSchipper3• 16 years ago

Sometimes, yes, but this does not explain many debates about (American) politics - where there's often a lot of heat and very little light, and no real attempt to convince the other side.

metamemetics7• 16 years ago

Or the set of people embroiled in the schema of partisanship and the set of people who are highly intelligent are disjoint.

sesqu4• 16 years ago

Perhaps this is because the other side is not well defined. In particular, you cannot expect them to follow the whole debate, merely excerpts and the general lines of it. So to keep the debate going, you have to debate most of the whole point every time, and you have a length restriction to boot. So what results is summaries and anecdotes, with memetic evolution making sure the summaries are resilient to amendment.

I wonder how they really do it. I've seen a lot of paper near politicians; perhaps they have the time and focus the audiences don't.

anamax3• 16 years ago

> Sometimes, yes, but this does not explain many debates about (American) politics - where there's often a lot of heat and very little light, and no real attempt to convince the other side.

Trying to convince the other side is often a dumb idea.

The goal is to get to 50%+1 (or whatever the threshold is). It's easier to get there by adding "the middle" to your base than it is to add "the other side" to your base.

This is why pols ignore the wishes of reliable supporters or opponents as much as they can.

InfinityX02• 16 years ago

I think Hacker News is strong supporting evidence of your point. There is some ability to display/leverage social standing here, but by and large, it is a platform of anonymous commenters commenting simply for the pleasure of discussion.

That, and anonymously validating our own intelligence through the karma system - but it seems the prior benefit is a larger pull.

timinman2• 16 years ago

The karma system has got to be a huge magnet for this kind of discussion.

j_baker2• 16 years ago

I don't think the article makes that assumption at all. I think it is just talking about how we act when we do signal.

obfuscate2• 16 years ago

It seems obvious that both motivations are often present.

sethg2• 16 years ago

Sure, we like to talk about ideas, but some ideas are more enjoyable to talk about than others.

I would absolutely disagree that intelligent people “realize social standing is often an illusion and not overly worth worrying about”. Humans are social animals, even if some of us recognize the existence of important things other than social standing.

Xurinos3• 16 years ago

I just wanted to follow up my reply to someone else below with a comment for you -- and bear in mind that I just want to dissect, to point out things, not to attack or offend you. Please do not take my response personally. You can easily apply my arguments to my own posts, and I will agree with you. :)

Your argument is an interesting proof of the notion that your speech signals social status. You mention "the most intelligent people". You then tell us what you believe they think. The implication is that you number amongst them or would like to be a member of that group.

In addition, you have not cited any proof of this argument; it is mere speculation. Yet you "would argue" this random opinion, expecting that others on this forum would care about that opinion. Your speech translates to a simple statement: "I have an opinion, too." or more simply "I am here. Look at me."

Your comment is a nice example of signaling social standing (whatever it really is, whatever you want us to believe it is).

nkurz5• 16 years ago

"Meta-contrarianism" is a good phrase to capture this phenomenon. In computers, I associate it with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem and in life, with the joke about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

The part that misses for me is his (my pronoun choice is conscious signalling [double 'l' is too, I suppose {as are the parentheticals}]) emphasis on triads.

For me, the key concept is that one never knows which level one is at. There is no absolute "level 1", just the "level n" that you occupy, and "level not n", which is never clearly n - 1 or n + 1.

One frequently assumes that those who disagree with you are missing something, but every now and then you have to wonder if they actually one ahead. And it happens often enough that people I think I agree with are actually viewing the situation in a completely foreign way.

Are there philosophical movements that deal with these situations? What names would I search for? What should I read?

luciferous• 16 years ago

Meta-contrarians are just early-adopters of the synthesis stage of a dialectic:

"Hegelian dialectic... a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

Anyway, could these be programmer triads/dialectics?

  * Objects are superior/closures are superior/Scala?
  * Statically-typed/dynamically-typed/some combo of both
  * Optimize/generalize/do each as required
  * Waterfall/Agile/(TDD/BDD?)
  * Relational/NoSQL/???

olalonde2• 16 years ago

Couldn't resist to complete the last one:

   * Relational/NoSQL/The tool for the job

Confusion5• 16 years ago

If there is any truth in what is argued, then this argument itself can be considered to be a display of intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism. Furthermore, any balanced position/argument could be indicted as 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarianism'. In that case, this article adds absolutely nothing to your understanding of the world and people's behavior. It's just pretending to show some deep insight, by knitting together platitudes about peoples' behavior in a seemingly novel and intellectual way.

Or, to be somewhat less of an 'intellectual hipster meta-...-meta-contrarian' (ain't I (un)cool?): what is argued is way to strong and way to broadly applied. 'Lesswrong' usually worries about the practicality of matters and this, on the one hand, just not an important factor, and on the other hand, irrelevant, even if it was, because you still have to counter the actual arguments that are made. If being an 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian' means taking a balanced position, for instance on

  - KKK-style racist / politically correct liberal / "but there are scientifically proven 
    genetic differences"
  - misogyny / women's rights movement / men's rights movement
  - conservative / liberal / libertarian
  - don't care about Africa / give aid to Africa / don't give aid to Africa

then, by God, let's have more 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's. If it doesn't in practice, for most 'intellectual hipster meta-contrarian's mean 'taking a balanced position', for whatever reason, then I think it's just an empty denomination.

mambodog• 16 years ago

So this is why I hate the idea of being expected to always put the toilet seat down. I'm a meta-contrarian. Or am I just a bit of a dick?

redthrowaway3• 16 years ago

There is some truth here, especially in regards to more intelligent people taking a mainstream view that lacks the illusion of nuanced thought. That said, I find it hard to read an article on "intellectual hipsterism" that claims the average IQ of their readers is 145. The page the author links to in support of that claim mentions two giant caveats: First, IQ is a notoriously difficult to measure metric of questionable validity, and second, the scores are self-reported. The reported values range from 120-180. Essentially, the survey suggests that the top half of their readership is in the top 1% of the national population. Even their bottom half is in the top 10%, by their statistics. This suggests a fatal flaw in the survey, and to mention the resulting statistic in such an offhand manner and with no warning to the reader of the problems with it suggests at best laziness, and at worst intellectual dishonesty on the part of the author. I find it hard, therefore, to take their argument at face value. That's not to say it's invalid, merely that the author's conduct does not support its validity.

fjh• 16 years ago

To be fair, there is a footnote pointing out how dubious that claim is.

jbooth2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I read the sentence as tongue-in-cheek humor.

nkurz5• 16 years ago

I would take it at face value.

First, the author is taking for granted that his readers are intelligent enough to realize that self-reported IQ scores are inaccurate, that IQ as measured is not equivalent to any real world intelligence, and that the accuracy of IQ tests is limited once one gets out to the extremes. He links directly to the survey --- what more can he do?

Second, I'd guess that the numbers are about right. In the same way that one would be safe assuming that the posters to StackOverflow are probably mostly in the top 1% of programming ability out the entire population of the world, I think it's likely a site dedicated to debating 'meta-contrarianism' might select quite precisely for people who can score well on standardized tests.

I'm not a regular reader, but I know enough about the site to suggest a solution: come up with a means of testing your hypothesis, and put up some money to back it. The more direct the better: bet them $1000 that none of the regular posters can show a bona-fide IQ test result higher than 160 (or whatever cutoff you think fairly accounts for the limited accuracy of the test at the extreme).

And then report back to us if it was money well spent!

redthrowaway3• 16 years ago

I'd rather not, thanks ;)

I'm sure if I challenged someone to come up with a result of 170, there'd be at least one person out there who could do it. My money is far better spent on tuition and beer.

Now, if I was a psych major, I might be able to get approval for a study comparing the congruency of self-reported IQ scores with measured, neutral ones in self-described intelligent communities. I'd apply for funding to set up testing for those who took the initial survey, and see what the results are.

bambax2• 16 years ago

Death actually is great. It's not being meta-contrarian to see that. There was a great speech by Steve Jobs making just this point (and I don't think he was trying to signal his intelligence by saying so?)

My death is bad for me (somewhat -- I'm not sure I'd enjoy living forever) but great for the world.

I understand that the point of the article absolutely is not to argue about the goodness or badness of death, but isn't it regrettable that the main example they use is so flawed?

joelmichael• 16 years ago

Haha, you're right, you're not being meta-contrarian. You're being contrarian, like the article says.

loewenskind5• 16 years ago

Nonsense. If people could live forever then they would have less children instinctively. How often is a new Einstein born (or Steve Jobs for that matter)? Was it great that Einstein died?

Living forever, or even 10 times longer than we do now would change so many variables there is no way to know what all would be affected.

bambax2• 16 years ago

My point was not to argue about the goodness of death either -- I would have thought it was non-controversial.

It's a very good thing Einstein did die, since his most important work was done in the first third of his life, and at the end he was simply denying that quantum mechanics were real.

Besides, if death did not exist and "people had less children" (meaning probably zero), Einstein would never have been born!

Please (re-)read what Steve Jobs had to say about death: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

From: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

Lesswrong couldn't be more wrong.

Or rather, they missed the point entirely.

This article reminded me of somebody who is pissed because they lost an argument, so they desperately search around for some kind of label or dirt to throw at the people that beat them. I don't know the history here, but it sure feels that way.

To put it simply: people do not take positions simply to counter-signal. Yes, some do, but it's a dangerous game to start labeling huge swaths of your fellow men because of something some may do. They use the example of the old rich and the new rich. The old rich didn't consume, looking down their noses at all the new money folks who spent like banshees.

Well maybe there is a certain type of person who just doesn't spend that much. Sam Walton was a billionaire, had a private jet, but he genuinely liked driving around in his pickup truck and flying his older prop airplane. Lots of folks get rich because they don't spend so dang much.

That's the problem here: people who know what the hell they are talking about and disagree with you might not be counter-signaling, they may actually be providing balance and some important things for you to consider to the discussion. But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off.

This is bullshit. In particular, it's a special form of elitist bullshit that seeks to categorize instead of understand.

I wish the lesswrong guys happiness, health, and success, but at some point -- how do I put this nicely? -- you run out of smart things to say. This however does not prevent you from taking up a lot of bytes saying it. (And I speak for myself as much as anybody else) If you're running a blog, sure, spam us with volume. Spray and pray. But if you're looking to provide some kind of consistent quality like with a branded name and multiple authors and such? More editing and reviewing and less self-serving pontificating. You need to be, well, less wrong. :)

obfuscate2• 16 years ago

> But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off.

I don't see the article doing this, though it could certainly be used that way (http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...), but as warning about a bias you might see in the world or in yourself. I mean, look at the final paragraph:

"If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

You understand, of course, that if I tell you that you are disagreeing with me simply because of counter-signaling, I am using an ad-hominem argument. It's another way of saying that you say has no value because you are the type of person who says such things for frivolous reasons.

It is the worst form of intellectual masturbation -- the putting on of airs to diagnose the reasons that other opinions exist in the world. Please don't let yourself do this. Ever.

Yes I understand that the author tried to dress this up as a self-analysis type of article, especially at the end, but the implication and thrust was pretty clear: we are analyzing the reasons others do and say things, especially things we find "wrong". Oh, and by the way, don't let yourself do this! But if the article was meant as introspection, it would have been written as introspection ("I find myself..." etc)

Sigh.

Please don't quote another article with the same source in a rebuttal. It makes the discussion about the site itself instead of the particular text in question. Its smacks of fanboyism. I know I started this with my closing remarks about the site itself, but the thrust of my point is that the article was plainly suboptimal. I stand by that assessment. I apologize if the remarks I offered on the site overall offended you.

You know you are in for trouble if the article begins with one site author quoting another as if they were a famous person. I knew a guy once that closed his emails by quoting himself. Not a good sign.

rms3• 16 years ago

DH4? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I am not sure of what the slightly different argument you are arguing against is. Did you think that the article said that meta-contrarians are bad? I'm pretty sure the author, Yvain, thinks meta-contrarians are good, for certain definitions of the word good.

This article doesn't claim to be some sort of definitive theory of human behavior. It's an entertaining essay on hipsters. Sometimes a blog post is just a blog post.

DanielBMarkham4• 16 years ago

DH5 - I qutoed the author regarding counter-signaling, then provided an example of why his premise not only did not hold but was counter-productive. I could go on at lengths with counter-examples if you'd like. Instead I found such list-making pedantic, and moved to the generalization of my refutation.

But you need to decide which tack you are taking. Are you saying it's frivolous and I am taking it too seriously? Or that it's a serious article and I didn't refute it well enough?

The article, oddly enough, wasn't about meta-contrarians. It was about counter-signaling. The meta-contrarian part was added as a shell.

Seems like there are a lot of fans here. I'm sure I'll be downvoted into oblivion, so it doesn't matter that much. I'm outta here.

crystalis3• 16 years ago

One basic problem is extending a specific case to all general cases. but that doesn't mean deciding Mersenne primes are an unhelpful concept because the number 15 exists is a good thing.

yummyfajitas• 16 years ago

I think you are simply unfamiliar with lesswrong.

They write articles like this all the time, and they are usually targeted at biases which afflict lesswrong readers disproportionately. A quick look finds at least 3 articles of this nature in the past 2 weeks [1].

The article also does not advocate for lumping people into the meta-contrarian class and discounting their opinions. It explicitly says not to do that: "meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism".

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ql/error_detection_bias_in_research... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distrac... http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pw/the_affect_heuristic_sentiment_a...

rms3• 16 years ago

Also, the more recent articles on Less Wrong do have a tendency towards the esoteric and insular. The best postings on Less Wrong were done by Eliezer Yudkowsky a while ago, archived at http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences.

loewenskind5• 16 years ago

>Sam Walton was a billionaire, had a private jet, but he genuinely liked driving around in his pickup truck and flying his older prop airplane.

Bad example. Sam Walton is a classic example of a "counter signal" and he knew quite well what he was doing. When he was alive executives were forbidden from driving their expensive cars to the office. From the Bentonville Walmart store, you can see a large mansion on a hill. It was built by an executive at Walmart. Sam Walton told him that if he must build such a home he would have to build it out of site. Especially out of the sight of store employees. The man refused to hide his hard earned wealth and built the mansion. Walton fired him.

Eliezer• 16 years ago

Sam Walton was awesome. I don't care if he did it as a coldly calculated matter of image, he's still awesome.

ugh• 16 years ago

One theme of many lesswrong articles is to identify possible human biases. This article seems to be consistent with that theme. The article simply posits a possible bias.

Do you think that those who first hypothesized about and described confirmation bias wanted to throw dirt or find a label for their opponents? Do you think that identifying human biases is not a worthy activity?

I’m not really sure why you seem to be so enraged about this article. Your belief that signaling doesn’t show itself in much of human behavior is fair enough and a valid criticism. I just don’t think that ad hominem was necessary. At least provide some evidence, some quote as to why you think the author wants nothing but to throw dirt.

zeynel1• 16 years ago

"the nouveau riche need to differentiate themselves from the poor, but the old money need to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche."

This is true; but there is a more fundamental reason for the newly rich to spend money: it is freedom.

People who did not have the right to earn and spend money; when they gain their right to earn and spend money; spend money to assert their freedom.

This is why women made spending money a ritual under the name of "shopping." They celebrate their newly found freedom.

noibl• 16 years ago

There's more to Intellectual positioning than signalling one's intelligence, even if the underlying motives are assumed to be more-or-less base. Hipsterism in general is about being ahead of the curve, not necessarily being the smartest in the room. With Intellectual Hipsterism that means being conversant with the latest ideas, not the most complex ideas. To be up-to-date with the latest radical thinking gives one a privileged position in the discourse because the proportion of the group for whom your input seems novel and interesting becomes greater. This puts the Intellectual Hipster at odds with the mere 'meta-contrarian' because a conservative opinion conservatively argued will never be perceived as novel or interesting. The Intellectually hip[1] will therefore argue in favour of a passé or seemingly discredited position using novel (conbinations of) techniques and references, thereby making the retro idea cool again!

--This post sponsored by the IH Institute, Salt Lake City--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek

Psyonic4• 16 years ago

Last I heard the IH Institute was in Portland...

waterhouse• 16 years ago

To the extent that "contrarian", "meta-contrarian", "meta-meta-contrarian", etc. people spread themselves over the ideological map, it becomes difficult to win favor by adopting a particular viewpoint (e.g. you'll get the contrarians and the meta-meta-meta-contrarians, but you'll piss off the meta-contrarians and slightly alienate the uneducated and the meta-meta-contrarians), and in the proximate future, people will adopt viewpoints more for other reasons--hopefully, because they care about the issue and have given it serious thought.

Once the zero-sum game of winning relative favor becomes saturated with fierce competition, new people will be discouraged from entering it, and will spend their effort on more productive things.

Also, once you notice a bunch of similar people (meta^n-contrarians) who argue several different sides of an issue, you stop thinking of each side as being, e.g., "traditional country folk vs. college students"; the ideas become dissociated from groups of people, and your opinion of an idea becomes dissociated from your opinion of a group. All you have to go on is the shape of the idea itself, which, I think, is the best way to approach ideas if you're searching for truth.

A while ago, someone posted the story "Rent a White Guy", which demonstrated how some clever Japanese companies took advantage of their potential clients' or investors' prejudice towards white CEOs by "renting" a white guy to act like a top executive for the duration of the company's presentation. I thought this was a good thing, because prejudiced investors who found out about tricks like this would have to stop bothering about the issue with future companies, unless they put a fair amount of effort into investigating whether the real CEO was in fact white. This would make things better for naive Japanese companies who didn't even consider the issue and just had their (Japanese) CEO do the presentation; and it would reduce the advantage of companies who did have white CEOs. I think this is all to the good.

For people who do real work and just can't be bothered to think about putting on peacock feathers, hardcore hipster fakers are friends and protectors. They make it harder for civilians to tell the difference between a "hip" guy who deliberately dresses unfashionably and a guy who dresses unfashionably because he doesn't think about how he dresses, he thinks about other things. This makes it easier to be a nerd (defined as someone who can't be bothered to do things because they are fashionable). I, for one, thoroughly approve of these people.

Psyonic4• 16 years ago

Your ideas about the white fake CEO's make sense, but I'm not so sure about the hipsters. The problem there is even though hipsters do dress "unfashionably", they always do it in a way thats different than those who aren't trying at all. In other words, most people don't have trouble distinguishing the two.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

At first I thought the author had inadvertently let some typos slip through, and that slightly annoyed me. Then I realized on further reading that the author was deliberately using third-person pronoun neologisms, and that seriously annoyed me.

roel_v2• 16 years ago

Do you mean as in "Ask any five year old child, and ey can tell you that death is bad." ? I've only ever seen it in this post and I figured it were a couple of typos, or a CMS eating 'th' for some reason.

sesqu4• 16 years ago

I assumed it was a parser eating the code point for a dental fricative, added in some misguided attempt to re-introduce ligatures at the data level. Pronoun neologisms never occurred to me.

It seems there's real harm in knowing about useless things.

loewenskind5• 16 years ago

Bizarrely, the first one really stood out for me (I came to the conclusion you did) but I didn't notice it anymore after that.

cruise02• 16 years ago

I just started reading it in a Cockney accent and it turned out fine. ;)

pjscott3• 16 years ago

I just figured that the author was winking while being partially serious, and it turned out fine.

drblast• 16 years ago

I remember this phenomenon from high school English class. The teacher would ask an obvious question, and inevitably someone would reflexively provide the non-obvious wrong answer.

I assumed the thought process was this: a teacher hardly ever asks questions with obvious answers, and I rarely understand what's going on, so when I give an answer I'm going to say the opposite of the obvious answer because that will probably be right.

It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important.

I know there is a better name for this than "meta-contrarian." Unfortunately my education is failing myself here. :-)

crystalis3• 16 years ago

You might be thinking of hypercorrection, which does seem to intersect at points with meta-contrarianism.

maw• 16 years ago

It's similar to how under-educated people will use reflexive pronouns and words they don't understand in order to sound educated or important.

You and myself (and I wonder whom else) accord that this is the penultimate instance that phenomena.

onefortwo• 16 years ago

When expressing in English my intelligence must be the half that when expression in my native language. And my IQ must be on average. So I will not read a post intended for a CI above 140, I only answer to the comment of drblast guy. If a teacher ask a question with an obvious answer like what is 3 + 3, then I can tell that it depends of the radix use are using, or if you are using 3 as a polynomial in some finite character field, or if you are using some computer language in which the symbols plus is concatenation of strings and the given operation is an error. In any case perhaps any of those answer should bother the teacher, so finally I should say excuse me ...

doki_pen• 16 years ago

Hmm.. It is fun to come up with a different angle on a common argument, even if you don't seriously believe it. Could it be just nature encouraging us to signal intelligence? Maybe. Does it matter? I know sex is for making babies, but I still enjoy it. I didn't stop when I figured out that it was only enjoyable for the purposes of evolution.

olalonde2• 16 years ago

Conclusion: if you're part of the over-intelligent crowd, resist the temptation of signaling.

Let's see if some meta^x-contrarian is going to argue with this :)

crux2• 16 years ago

I found myself completely stymied once that article got to the section about death. I haven't read their other articles on the subject, but they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'. That seems insane to me. Does anybody think that a world without death—or even human death—would be less than hellish? Is it really false wisdom to be glad that living things, or living people, do not infinitely multiply, age, expand, consume resources? Or even false wisdom to try to see the good in the death of an individual?

Further, the author takes it as uncontroversial that it is 'wrong' to dwell on the problems of modern industrial society, and hypothesizes that one would only do it in order to signal one's intelligence. They don't think it would be useful—indeed, necessary—for many people to spend a lot of time thinking about the ills of A just because you can conclude that it is a greater good than not-A? Is that really the only way that it works? If I mention that industrial society destroys the environment and alienates the individual, then my argument must be, 'therefore, it is ultimately an evil, and we should scrap it for unelectrified villages.'

I like the way the author illustrates the signalling effect in terms of consumption, culture, and even cocktail party conversation; but I'm not sure the mechanism is quite as strong as they think.

Another way of putting it is: a lot of the intellectual arguments that the author likes to cast as counter signalling games can just as easily be characterized as successive philosophies and arguments that respond to the facts available to them and the values of the societies in which they arise. You COULD say that very intelligent people who don't want to give aid to Africa are motivated by a need to counter-signal the rather intelligent people who do; or you could say that they are motivated by their own understanding of the best way to increase the economic condition in Africa. If both of those could be said of any person, what value does this psychological model really have?

endtime2• 16 years ago

>they seem to find it rather uncontroversial to assert that anyone who thinks that death is ultimately good, and not bad, is 'pretending to be wise'.

Eliezer talked about this at at the Singularity Summit...I can't find the slides, but his subsequent update of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (yes, really) pretty much said the same thing. The relevant part starts around halfway down this chapter: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...

I think this is a pretty common position among the futurist/transhumanist/singularitarian community. The standard inductive argument is basically "I want to be alive tomorrow, and tomorrow I will feel the same way. Therefore, I will never want to die."

Edit: Oh, the other point that is often made is that if you grew up on a planet where everyone randomly got hit over the head with a baseball bat every few minutes, there would probably be people who talk about how this is a good thing, because it helps you greater appreciate the bat-free minutes and helps you stay on your toes, etc. But, other things being equal, as an Earthling you probably wouldn't want to go and live on that world. Likewise, if you came form a society where people didn't die, and someone offered you the opportunity to completely cease to exist one day, you probably wouldn't take it.

bitwize• 16 years ago

Oh, the other point that is often made is that if you grew up on a planet where everyone randomly got hit over the head with a baseball bat every few minutes

So... Vogsphere (2005 movie)?

Psyonic4• 16 years ago

What if we argue, not from the good of the individual, but the good of society? Isn't there a saying that goes something like, "Society progresses one funeral at a time?"

pjscott3• 16 years ago

A better model would probably be a Markov chain, where the states are "don't want to die", "want to die", and "dead". If you can show that the transition probability to wanting to die is very low, then you could show that you'll want to live a hell of a lot longer than is currently possible.

Tycho• 16 years ago

It's a good read but this contour-signalling only works when you have two or three levels at play. The question is whether his/her grouping of people into two or three tiers is realistic, useful, or arbitrary. Upper-middle-lower-upper-middle-middle class etc.

m-photonic• 16 years ago

I can understand the article's placement of libertarianism at the top of the political triad, but at the same time it does seem like (in online arguments at least) people with nuanced positions more often make an effort to distinguish themselves from libertarians than from liberals or conservatives.

araneae2• 16 years ago

Yes, those would be the meta-meta-contrarians.

starpilot• 16 years ago

Here's an "uneducated/contrarian/meta-contrarian divide" triad, about Facebook:

what's facebook? / facebook is great! / facebook is beneath me, and I rarely use it (Marco Arment: http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/5-questions-with-tumbl... )

So, tech hipsters, you too can join in on the fun.

rms3• 16 years ago

/ Facebook is beneath me and I can't stop refreshing.

Intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarians

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