Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all

For someone with tech credentials, Myhrvold’s post is really a classic of Internet phobia. The tone is “And I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for you meddling bloggers”.

roughly infinity more money

I thought you got a few squid if CiF articles went into the centre column?

I am really sorry that nobody seems to have taken them up on their altruism-is-illusion excerpt, as much of an offence to psychology and ethics as their chapter on global cooling was to climate science and economics.

Well, not just the freakzoids but Chicago economics tout court is a standing offense to psychology and ethics, and it gets kind of boring to point that out for the five thousandth time.

I don’t know…in recent years I’ve become convinced that 99% of contrarianism is just an easy substitute for actually thinking.

I wouldn’t say 99%, but yes, I agree: most contrarianism is as conventional a pose as anything else. The New Republic (and Slate!) proved that long ago.

I think you copied that final link from the wrong browser window. Should be https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/10/in-praise-of-budweiser-contains-extended-footnotes/ , no?

J, wrong thread, head over to the one on ‘brows’…. it’s SO fun!!

Someone’s got “lowbrow” confused with “löwenbräu”.

Contrarians should whine more.

If they wanted to be contrarian, they could start with “Chicago economists know fuck-all about anything”, which at least be contrarian compared to their peer group.

Daniel ‘Contra’ Davies: “oddly enough I was talking about this with a Big Name British Blogger tonight, as we sunk a few lowbraüs. yes you’re right; microbrews basically get over the problem of batch-consistency by making sure that every single batch tastes of hops and alcohol.”

There’s a trick called a ‘boilermaker’ in the USA, which will take care of bad-tasting beer :)

Yes, the macho IBU arms race is getting a bit tiresome. And I say that as one who, for example, likes Stone IPA and even, from time to time with spicy food, Arrogant Bastard. But mostly I go for Belgian-style ales and fortunately they’re not really subject to this disease, the Belgians having learned long ago that there’s far more to the taste of beer than hops.

Gareth Rees wrote, “It’s a tragedy of the commons: by the nature of contrarianism, there can’t be all that many issues on which it’s really the case that Everything You’ve Ever Thought You Knew Is Wrong.”

I don’t know that that’s true. Given that people are supposedly boundedly irrational in systematic ways, it wouldn’t shock me if much of what people believe is wrong. It’s becoming (or has become) a commonplace* in philosophy that:

(1) There is no God
(2) There is no free will
(3) Personal identity is a matter of convention rather than of fact (or, at the very least, that the commonsensical notion of personal identity is hopelessly confused)
(4) Moral claims are not in fact truth-evaluable or, if they are, then they are all false.

A lot of people–the vast majority of laypeople, I’d wager–seem to believe the denials of (1)-(4), which makes them wrong about a whole helluva lot of stuff.

Was your point, Gareth, that “by the nature of contrarianism, there can’t be all that many issues on which it’s really the case that Everything [well-educated academics] Ever Thought [they] Knew Is Wrong”?

I forgot to fill in the “*” to my comment 24.

When I say that theses (1)-(4) have become a commonplace in philosophy, I do not mean that they are the majority view (though (1) surely is, (3) probably is, and (2) is getting steadily more popular), just that they don’t shock any philosopher, and that there are a substantial number of well-known and respected philosophers who argue for (1)-(4).

Daniel writes,

“[Mhyrvold writes] Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl.

“Okay, point one. The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.”

But is Mhyrvold really complaining just that people got annoyed with him? I got the impression from his blog that he was upset about Joe Romm getting Mhyrvold’s claims wrong. Mhyrvold writes, “In a recent series of blog posts, Romm levels one baseless, bald charge after another.” I don’t think he was complaining about people’s defensiveness per se; I think he was pointing to people’s ideology causing them to become annoyed by attacks and then misrepresenting their adversary because of their annoyance. The main problem Mhyrvold has, it seems to me, is that he’s being misrepresented.

Of course, whether he was actually misrepresented is another issue.

@Sisi I never knew that etymology for “five-dollar word”, and I like it a lot. Now some contrarian will come along and tell us it’s wrong, I’m sure

@23 We reviewed Freakonomics here, and most of us (Daniel was an exception who has been justified by events) thought it was pretty good. While the examples were mostly trivial, they illustrated the power of techniques that Levitt and others have applied to real economic issues. For example, in the post on school privatisation just below, we are arguing about work of this kind done by Caroline Hoxby on the benefits of charter schools (there are some problems with Hoxby’s study, but that’s not an objection to the approach as such). Where I disagreed with Levitt was his routine obeisances to the Chicago tribal deity of ‘incentives’, when most of the studies showed that incentives didn’t work in the way simple economic theory would predict. Unfortunately, at least in Chapter 5, SuperFreakonomics seems to be nothing but Chicago tribal beliefs, expressed in “contrarian” form.

“They assert something, in a deniable fashion, and then deny it when finally pinned down on it.”

This is the Contrarian Two-Step, and when well executed it’s a thing of beauty. You take Step One in your titles, chapter titles, introductory paragraphs: this is where you tell peopl “that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down” and so on.

You move to Step Two deep in the middle of your chapters, where you get technical and argue that the world is, in fact, just slightly different from the way some people think it is.

The key is in the transition. Execute it badly and you fall smack on your head, but execute it well and you can spin expertly between the two steps. Someone claims you’re saying nothing new, you spin to Step One – “Your world is turned upside down! You just don’t get it!”

An opponent points out that your big claims are baseless, you shrug your shoulders in a charming manner and modestly point to a few paragraphs from the middle of your book: “That is not it at all”, you say, shaking you head wisely, “I’m just taking part in a rational and technical discussion. Why do you have to get all emotional about it? ”

If you can keep your balance, you can two-step between eschatology and technical minutae all the way to the bank.

Daniel, I don’t much like hanging out at CommentIsFree (and don’t do rss) but I do like reading your articles. Especially if there is a reward to you, could CT start posting links to StuffYouWriteElsewhere on the main page? On a prominent sidebar if you’re collectively worried that it’s not interesting enough for a whole post. Cross-posting things makes it super-easy for the lazy reader like me, but what’s the blogosphere for if you can’t alert your fans and direct us to more gems. Click here and donate 5 grains of rice to the needy, that kind of thing. We’re up for it, right, gang?

Unfortunately there only appear to have been two articles this year, one of which was entitled Nick Griffin in Europe? Not likely

Did anyone else catch Question Time tonight? Griffin was (unintentionally) hilarious – I particularly liked the comeback on the KKK: “But they were the non-violent ones!”

My contrarian 2 cents5 dollars: Now that Budweiser’s become fashionable again, I’m going to be uber-cool by hating that “beer” substitute again. I call this win-win.

31 “If Global warming only involved more prostititution!”
But one involves hotness, and the other hotties. There’s gotta be a connection somewhere.

I don’t mean to sound contrarian, but if the telegraph service ever charged five dollars for sending a single word, it’s no wonder they don’t exist any more.

(and it is apparently impossible to resolve the question as an internet search for “fifty cent words” just basically turns up the lyrics to “get rich or die trying”)

When I lived in Hungary and was traveling outside it but still in the East Bloc, I remember we still could use telegrams. They were quick, really quick, if you did them right. I don’t imagine they ever literally cost $5 even for a big word in the States.

Anyway, the way they actually worked, alex, at least for us, was that you paid BY the word, no matter HOW long. And word was defined by characters space characters. I guess in a sense it was an honor system. Anyhoozel, the girl I was dating then spoke fluent Russian, and so did I*, so I romanized my telegrams in the Hungarian style, and ran usually 2-3 words together, breaking it up with a few words left alone, so the end result looked like typical Hungarian. I can’t remember what it ended up costing that way, but given how little I was living on, it couldn’t have been more than a quarter to send a pretty long letter, and guaranteed overnight, if not earlier. Plus, Hungarian-romanized Russian is pretty private. If you did the equivalent in the US you’d probably be picked up as a spy.

*Better than my Hungarian.

In Master and Margarita a big chunk of his comedic storyline is based on exchange of telegrams. They even do money transfers by telegraph. Sometimes a telegram is referred to as “lightening”.

Anyway, the way they actually worked, alex, at least for us, was that you paid BY the word, no matter HOW long.

This was generally the case – hence foreign correspondents got into the habit of writing telegraphese, things like Waugh’s famous exchange with his editor on a rumour of a British civilian nurse killed during the invasion of Ethiopia:
SEND TWO HUNDRED WORDS UPBLOWN NURSE
He replied NURSE UNUPBLOWN.

The exception was that some telegraph systems charged more for “unpronounceable” words. This is relevant for commercial code systems – if you encrypted your message and it came out as JIWUL BINOF WAGAR and so on, it would cost you less to send than one that came out as RDHTR LLVEO PAFZX. So you got cryptosystems that were designed to produce pronounceable ciphertext by alternating vowels and consonants.

king rat, DD wasn’t describing the provocation as passive aggressive, he was describing the follow-up move, where a bid is made for the moral high ground by being the unruffled concern-troll — if you set out to sting a sharp reaction out of someone, then turn all “more in sorrow than in anger” about the sharpness of this reaction (or start smirking that you “murt have hit a nerve”) , this is indeed passive aggressive behaviour

I should say that at no point did I observe DD consuming even a drop of Budweiser.

After dsquared’s famous post, I went out and tried some Budweiser. It was a big disappointment. It was that day I learned the true value of contrarianism.

Questioner –

I’m curious – is it your assertion that everything that a majority of trendy philosophers believe is, ipso facto, correct? Would a majority of trendy philosophers, in fact, agree with that statement? (You can see where I’m going here, in an “All Cretans” etc sense…)

If Global warming only involved more prostititution! But unfortunately it doesn’t.

You know a *real* contrarian will take this as a challenge, right?

One possible connection lies in prostitution tourism — a form of regulatory arbitrage that allows the tourist/john to get laid in a jurisdiction more permissive (whether de jure or de facto) than his homeland. (Like all regulatory arbitrage, it eventually results in a race to… uh, never mind.) If the method of travel has substantial carbon impact (which it generally does), and that’s the genuine motive for the trip, then allowing the same men to patronize local prostitutes (I’ll refrain from inventing any slogans for this movement) would reduce carbon emissions and benefit the environment. Therefore, every place on Earth should legalize prostitution.

There: technically true, completely impractical, a sweeping conclusion ignoring all factors not explicitly considered, and involves prostitutes. I firmly expect it to be adopted for Freakonomics 3.

I merely say, in general, that a contrarian may have a valid and telling point when he complains that his opponents are generating more heat than light.

Indeed. The valid and telling point, however, would be merely about his/her own lack of self-awareness.

Well, once you’ve used it, be sure and send some to Levitt.

“Le faro? C’est de la bière deux fois bu.” -Baudelaire, Amoenitates Belgicae

A simpler explanation, is that they are Prostitutes for the Oil / Coal Industry. Just another, of many, in the “journalism” profession, Bought Out by Coal Money. There ought to be a law where we can Eject Paid Prostitutes from the Profession, instead we have Rupert Murdoch and Fox “news”.

The only real question is, “How much?”

After reading Levitt’s latest, I get it: it isn’t just about pissing off liberals, it is about pissing off Indians. You know, the guys in that subcontinent who depend on monsoons? Well, screw that! It’ll just be so much trouble – a trillion a year (he said, barely able to contain his laughter) to get carbon emissions down,so why not engineer the planet with sulfur particulates that will have practically no downside, save for that monsoon thing that will only kill Indians.

I’m wondering if this is for real, or if it is a Yes man spoof.

Levitt & Dubner advocate the equivalent of dumping 1-2 Mt. Pinatubos of sulfur dioxide into the global atmosphere every year forever . What they propose dumping into the atmosphere is what causes acid rain. The amount they propose should be dumped into the atmosphere would exceed even the worst period of air pollution in the post WWII era, when entire forests in Eastern Europe were dying from acid rain and hundreds of lakes and rivers in Canada became dead and sterile from acid rain.

Their “solution” would also hasten — rather than stop — ocean acidification which could wipe out the entire marine food chain by preventing plankton from building their bodies from calcium carbonate (the ocean would be too acidic and dissolve them). No more oceanic plankton. No more coral reefs. No more oceanic food chain. The only way to stop ocean acidification (which occurs by CO2 being dissolved in seawater, lowering its pH) is to put a brake on atmospheric CO2 levels. Levitt & Dubner’s “solution” would allow CO2 levels to go up, and up, and up …

This has nothing to do with being “contrarian” — it has to do with getting all your facts wrong and omitting the rest.

As I heard it, the point of “Peccavi” wasn’t to save telegram charges, it was to get a message through that the English recipient would understand and that wouldn’t be understood by anyone on the other side who happened to see the message.

If you’re an English-speaker, you translate “Peccavi” as “I have [verb tense marker] sinned,” which is homophonic to “I have [possess] Sindh.” In most other languages, the perfect tense marker is not even close to the verb for “have,” and the place-name “Sindh” isn’t going to be suggested by the verb meaning “sin.”

An essayist once wrote a list (now lost in the dimmer reaches of the net, alas) containing number of translations for terms taken from personal ads. My favorite was seeing “Let’s challenge each other’s most deeply held preconceptions” translated as “I will disrupt your life for reasons I do not fully understand.”

Then again, I may have been biased at that point, having recently broken up with a woman who could be aptly described by the phrase, “She thought she was a contrarian, but in fact she was merely disagreeable.”

Deft use of magic scare quotes:

The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people.

Compare this:
The whole idea of conspiracism is you’re “just asking questions”, or “applying scepticism to official claims” or “researching the secret state”. In other words, you [yes, you sir] are indulging a prurient taste for paranoid fantasy.

As for Mhyrvold, while opinion given under the aegis of supposed expert authority is one of very few cases in which motive-based meta-argument (crude ad hom.) is apt*, a 5-minute internet search suggests that M is not disputing received wisdom qua received wisdom (i.e. ‘being contrarian’), still less aiming to piss people off. He’s attacking solar power to promote the nuclear reactors he hopes to develop (with a little help from his friends).

Anyway, let’s assume that these people do indeed only do it to annoy, because they know it teases. Why should they (choose to) be governed by a rule that tells them to stop at the first round of annoyance, when they could annoy even more teasingly by being evasive, backtracking, whining, etc?

*Others being testimony, those who explicitly say “trust me” (or “I’m a pretty straight kind of guy”), and (to some extent) known timewasting talkers of bollocks.

J’ai, Ich habe … ho, habia – is this right?

Depends if “most modern European languages” covers “most other languages”. Doubt it, me.