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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have any unpopular opinions you're not a very interesting person. And if you can't even argue as a devil's advocate for the other side, you're not a very skilled thinker. And institutions that don't foster and protect divergent thinkers do not produce interesting science or engineering.

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There are loads of people who I find interesting because of their accomplishments, skills, expertise, or life experiences.

For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting.

> For most people, another person doesn’t need to be contrarian to be interesting.

I’d go one further and say that contrarians are intrinsically uninteresting. They are very predictable and tedious in their inability to accept ideas just because they are accepted by others. Being systematically opposed to ideas because they are perceived as mainstream is just as much of a fallacious reasoning than the other way around.

If someone is a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, I tend to agree.

“Having contrary opinions” and “being a contrarian” are as similar as “having a glass of milk” and “being a cow”.

It’s not about contrarian opinions, it’s about contrarian people. I thought the quoted sentence was obvious.

> If you don't have any unpopular opinions you're not a very interesting person

Except that there are many types of unpopularity that you have conflated.

Having intolerant views about trans people for example does not in my opinion make you interesting.

It just makes you intolerant.

The problem is that being justifiably critical of laws and policies that eradicate female-only spaces is now being framed as a bigoted and intolerant anti-trans viewpoint, and this reframing is being used to suppress such critical speech.

> intolerant views about trans people

Unfortunately, those are nowhere near universally unpopular views at this point in our human journey.

> Having intolerant views about trans people for example does not in my opinion make you interesting. It just makes you intolerant.

Sure, if both parties already agree on the meaning of "intolerance", but what qualifies as intolerance is exactly the dispute.

I love a good strongman argument over strawman any days

Institutions are intentional normalizers. That’s the definition of the word “institution”; an entity that exists to service an idea. To build consensus around its attributes and parameters.

Corporations normalize utilitarian agency. Government social policing. University thinking.

Institutions never produced interesting science or engineering; people did. Institutions took all the credit.

Denying climate change is a very popular opinion.

In specific circles, maybe

Among politicians, for example.

See the other reply to my comment… didn't take long for a denier to come out.

They didn't deny anything. They stated that the issue isn't so black and white as you'd like it to be. You responded in kind by simply labeling them a "denier" even though nowhere in their response did they deny anything.

There are perfectly acceptable, even scientific arguments against CO2-induced climate change theory. Not only that, but even if we accept the premise that CO2 is inducing climate change, we can debate about to what degree, and whether or not it is "an existential crisis" as some have argued. Further still, if we accept that it's a crisis, we can also debate on the trade-offs civilization should make in order to contend with it. All of those positions should be perfectly acceptable to take up. We do not know with anywhere close to 100% confidence what the climate will do over the next few decades. It is a non-linear, dynamic, chaotic system that by definition becomes exponentially unpredictable as a function of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

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