Intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarians

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.

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. :-)

"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?

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.

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.

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/???

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

"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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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

Problem solved.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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 :)

"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.

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

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?

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 ...

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?