Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hi, Agnes. And?

Agnes:

Hi, Aella. Thank you for coming on our podcast.

Aella:

Well, yeah, thanks for having me.

Agnes:

So we thought we'd start and maybe finish by talking to you about contrarianism. Are you a contrarian?

Aella:

What do you mean by contrarian?

Agnes:

I think, so I think it could be understood in two different ways. And one of them, it was so someone who reliably thinks quite differently from most other people. That would be one way to think about it. And the other way is somebody who does that on purpose or for its own sake or intentionally does that. And that actually maybe now I came up with a third is somebody who is perceived as doing either one of those two things. Sometimes I think that's all it's meant by confirming is that other people perceive you as such. So yeah, in one of those senses.

Aella:

Yeah, probably all of them. I think I accidentally think very weird things, but then also it's very interesting to find out the ways that people are inconsistent and the ways that yourself are inconsistent, which requires looking for the gaps. You have to find out. You have to hone in very specifically on the thing that people consider to be contrary to popular opinion. If you're trying to be really consistent in a lot of ways. And then thirdly, a lot of people consider me to be quite saying things for things sake or something.

Robin:

Let me make a distinction between whether you consider unusual topics and then what your opinion on that topic is if you consider it in some deck. So that's how I feel, perhaps, about some of my contrarian views. So clearly, if you have a person who's a chemist, they're going to have many opinions about chemistry most people won't have because they're specializing and focusing on chemistry. And that isn't particularly strange or disreputable. Yet, many of us have opinions on the usual topics that most people don't have opinions on, and then they consider us contrarian, and there's something different about that. I think it's where they... So with chemistry, most people just don't have any opinion, but there are these other topics where people have opinions, but they don't think about them. And then they see us as contrarian when we think in detail about them, they come up with these detailed opinions that differ from their opinions not based on thinking about

Aella:

Yeah, you're like, hey, bro, your intuition seems to not make sense if you squint at it more closely. And then they're like, oh, God, why are you doing this to me? You are a contrarian. Stop it.

Robin:

But even say with physics, there are many ways ordinary intuitive physics is different from professional accurate physics. But people don't call physicists contrarians for believing in black holes or quantum theory or string theory or things like that. So there's something else going on.

Aella:

Wait, so I get called an edgelord a lot more than I get called a contrarian, and I'm wondering if it's a generational thing. Do you get the contrarian word?

Robin:

I've definitely gotten edgelord. So there was somebody who wrote a post about me calling me an edgelord, and their stick was- And we did a podcast with them actually about it. Yes, we did a podcast with that person here on this show. And their shtick was that I would be doing it on purpose. So I think the edgelord concept was more that you reveled in making people see you as contrarian, not just that you happen to be contrarian.

Aella:

Absolutely, contrarian is just like being kind of annoying about it. And being an edgelord is like rejoicing and being annoying about it.

Agnes:

I want to ask about the inconsistency. You said it's interesting to find how people are inconsistent and interesting to find how you yourself are inconsistent. Why is that interesting?

Aella:

I don't know. Because it means you're wrong somewhere. There's a thing where often we hold beliefs that are contradictory, but we don't realize they're contradictory because they're held in kind of different parts of our brain. And then when you bring them into contact, you realize like, wait, these cannot both exist in my head at the same time. And that means that I need to let go of one of them or update. And that's interesting because I don't know how many things in my head I'm incorrect about. And one of the best ways to figure that out is through noticing inconsistency.

Robin:

But it is true that there's a world of people who sort of share points of view that they accept as a unit. And then when people try to find the inconsistencies and fix them, those people end up being more contrary. They end up having different opinions from the usual opinion by trying to eliminate inconsistencies.

Aella:

Well, it seems kind of inevitable, right? What are the chances that the current social set of norms around thinking are right? Out of all of the human history that happened and all of the human futures that will happen, what are the chances that we've got 90% of it correct right now? I think that's super low. Inevitably, if you just start thinking really hard about something and really optimize for figuring out a consistent system, it's just going to be contrary, almost necessarily.

Robin:

But if everybody believed that, then they would be eager to find these contrarian views and copy them and accept them. And the apparent observation is these contrarians go in all possible directions. That is that the widespread perception is that you have the usual point of view. And then when these people think about things, trying to eliminate their consistencies, they just go everywhere. They don't go consistently go in the same direction. They go in all possible directions.

Aella:

Do you agree with this?

Robin:

Well, when you aggregate at a broad enough level, it's roughly true. That is to say, do they go left or right politically, or for older young people, or male versus female? If you just pick a few standard directions, it does seem like the people who think a lot tend to have more divergent opinions in a wide range of these dimensions.

Aella:

Yeah, this is true. I guess it depends on the kind of inconsistency that you're trying to figure out. I think there's a lot of things that kind of look like you're trying to figure out inconsistencies, but aren't. There's some people on Twitter I'm aware of where it feels like it's more of a social performative role. Actually, I don't think people say that about me, but it feels like it's actually more of a social performative role than it is this earnest direct truth finding thing. And I think from the outside, it's kind of hard to tell apart, especially if you're a little naive about it or new, or if you haven't figured out good strategies for thinking properly or whatever. Rationality stuff, basically, is what I'm thinking of.

Robin:

Right. So I think you're exactly right. That is, a lot of people see this difference between taking ordinary opinion and thinking about it, and they kind of LARP that. And the way to LARP it is just to end up with a variety of weird opinions that you can defend with arguments. That's what it looks like from a distance to have thought about something. And that's how they play it out.

Agnes:

It seems to me that it's pretty important. So the thing that Ayo said earlier, which is like, there are all these different norms, but what are the chances that we've hit on the right ones? The idea that there is a right one, there's like a possibility of getting it right or doing something correctly. I think that that's gotta be key to the difference between the performative contrarian and the not merely performative contrarian, which is to say, if you're just doing it as a performance, then in effect, you're not that attuned to the question, are these the right ones? You're just trying to find like a nice collection or something, maybe even just a consistent collection. And Robin, this connects to something we were talking about earlier today about your skepticism that there are correct answers. Now, our conversation was about emotion and feeling, but like that you could equally well raise it about norms. So there's a question like, it seems to me a lot hangs on the question, are there right norms.

Aella:

What are you asking about? Like norms in what regard?

Agnes:

Wherever you point out an inconsistency. Say the person believes or if it's going to be normative, they're going to tend to behave or tend to praise or shame X and then they're also going to tend to praise or shame like not X. Do the opposite, right? And then they're being inconsistent, right? And what's the interest of pointing that out? And you say, well, they can't both be right. Yeah. But maybe neither of them is right. Maybe there's no right. In which case, the interest of pointing out the inconsistency goes away, except as a performance.

Aella:

Yeah, I kind of, like, ultimately I sort of think of correctness not as like, I know this is kind of heresy. I'm not sure I fully agree, but I'm going to say it, which is I kind of feel like the truth is not ... There's no objective truth. There's only consistency. I feel quite amenable to worldview systems that are consistent even if they're separate, or they in themselves don't agree with each other. Often I'll be probing at somebody's role to you and be like, what about this? These two things don't make sense. But then if they bite all the bullets and they're like, yes, it's consistent all the way down, then I feel like I don't have a fight with them anymore, even if I don't really agree with the conclusion. I'm like, okay, you're cohesive. I feel like I'm just looking for cohesivity as opposed to correctness, if that makes sense.

Robin:

I think that each person, from their point of view, has some concept of truth they're going for. I mean, at least that's how it feels to them at the time. You could say it's relative to some way that they're different from other people. But I think from the point of understanding contrarianism, the difference isn't that some people don't believe in truth or not. That is, it seems to me there's just something else going on that's making some people contrarian, other people not, than whether or not they believe there is some, you know, objective standard. There's these areas where we tend to say there is no objective truth, like say artistic genres. And so it might be interesting to compare contrarianism in those arenas with contrarianism elsewhere, where people tend to believe that there is some truth, like say UFOs or something. Then do we see a difference in contrarianism in those two areas? If we don't see much difference, we might than attribute processes that don't have much to do with whether there's a truth.

Aella:

I'm not sure I totally understand. I could imagine contrarianism coming from different places. Maybe you want the attention, maybe you want the sense of being on the cutting edge of novel thinking or something. Maybe I'm not understanding, but different kinds of contrarianism

Robin:

That's exactly the question, right? Agnes introduced this question of, is there really a truth, say, about some moral or norm questions? And my first question is, is that relevant to our topic of understanding the different kinds of contrarianism and their nature and their sources and et cetera? And in order to study that, we might ask, well, in areas where we all agree there isn't so much of a truth, do we see contrarianism be different? If not, then it's not necessarily, it's not obviously the relevant thing.

Aella:

What is contrarianism in the art industry?

Robin:

I don't know anything about this. Well, some people like weird art and some people like mainstream art and people disagree a lot about the art.

Aella:

Contrarian concept though? Like if you're making weird art, are you being contrarian?

Robin:

Well, that's exactly my question. Okay. That is, is that look different or not? In terms of social behavior or the way people criticize them or things like that?

Aella:

Yeah, I don't know.

Robin:

It seems to me that when people all like a certain movie and somebody says, oh, I hate that, they think they're wrong and they think they're being contrarian. Okay, that's true.

Agnes:

I guess anytime there's a consensus, it's going to be possible to be contrarian, but with a lot of art, there isn't that much consensus. So it just won't be clear which is the contrarian position and everybody will just argue a lot, which is like my experience about movies.

Aella:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I don't see what the truthiness of something has to do with contrarianism that's motivated by trying to do social signaling. It just seems like, are you saying an unpopular thing or not?

Agnes:

So let me trace the route, how we got to truth. It was because I asked, you said, you like pointing out inconsistency. I said, why is that interesting? You said, because that's a way to figure out which of them is really right. And what are the chances that all of our norms are right? Yeah, OK. And then you said, well, maybe you don't care so much about truth, but about consistency. You directly just care about consistency. And interestingly, that's a theory of truth. There's a theory of truth called the coherence theory of truth. That's just what truth is, right? And it occurred to me that maybe the battle between the contrarians and the anti-contrarians could be a kind of referred battle between coherentists about truth and correspondence theory of truth, which is like there's a reality to which our claims correspond and either correspond or doesn't, and it's not just about consistency. Because say you're a correspondence theorist of truth, and say you think, that, um, like, there's a fact of the matter, then it may be that my... the contradictory thought that I have and the confused and incoherent thought could actually be closer to the truth than if I just cut one of them off and threw it in the garbage. Because it may be that I'm not yet now fully able to work through those contradictions, but they're tracking something. And if you come along to me and you're very rational and you're like, look, dump this one or dump this one, then I feel threatened. Mm hmm. Because I'm like, no, there's a truth out there. There's a reality that I want to grasp. And right now, my best access to it is through this contradiction. Mm hmm.

Aella:

Yeah, I think that this is a mistake a lot of naive rationalists make or something. I kind of imagine is that you have just a pool of data or a massive amount of pixels on a screen and you're trying to find the visual illusion that makes the most meaning out of the most of the pixels. And you're trying on different frames, different images kind of show up. And it's a mistake to throw any of the pixels. I don't think you should discard a pixel because it's not fitting the meaning making system that you have right now, but tracking them, being like, this one is not a great fit. I'm going to notice that this pixel is not a great fit and wait until I can find some sort of system that incorporates it better.

Robin:

I feel like we're exploring one theory of contrarianism, so we should just highlight that as a theory and ask how many other theories we should compare it to. So the theory we're focusing on at the moment is maybe that People who are seen as contrarians are just more focused on consistency than other people, and maybe a naive consistency where they are too eager to throw things away on the basis of inconsistency. That theory of contrarians does predict that they would end up with different points of view, and it predicts that their views would be more wrong on average. But it's not the only available theory of why people are contrarian, so I feel we should consider alternatives.

Agnes:

Okay, give us an alternative.

Robin:

Well, they could just care more about the topic. Like one theory of contrarians is most people just have a point of view on the topic they just accept and they just go on without thinking about it. And then there's some people who just care about the topic more and then they just go into more detail on that and they try to think harder about it. And then predictably, they end up with different opinions than the people who don't think much about it, that would explain contrarians having different opinions from ordinary people, but it doesn't explain maybe how high the variation of the contrarians' opinions is, which is why that was an issue before. If all the contrarians ended up going the same direction, that would be much more consistent with they just thought about it more carefully and ended up at the truth than if the contrarians go all sorts of directions as they think about the topic more, which is perhaps more consistent with they're just overly focused on consistency.

Agnes:

It also isn't consistent. It wouldn't predict that contrarians are contrarians about so many things, some of which they don't care about. That is, you would want to look at, are the contrarians only contrarian about the thing they've really invested into, or are they kind of contrarian all over the place? And at least many contrarians are kind of contrarian all over the place, not just about the things they've invested time into.

Robin:

Well, for that, I would introduce this distinction between maybe a LARPing contrarian and a thoughtful contrarian, that is the LARPing contrarian would in fact do that because they're just trying to create the overall image of it.

Aella:

I'm not sure that I actually agree with the thought that like why are the contrarians all over the place? Like imagine you have a situation where you want to go find some buried treasure and you release like a hundred people who really care about finding the buried treasure and you tell them to go dig. They probably would dig in a lot of places. And then you release a hundred people who are pretending to care about finding buried treasure and are following social norms really hard. They're probably going to, oh, I'll dig in a single place. I don't know if I'm trying to make a good analogy as I go, but you might expect significantly more agreement among people who are obeying this for social pressure. But you might just see, we would expect inherently greater greater diversity for people who actually care. So I'm not sure I would perceive it as evidence.

Robin:

But that is, the specific places the treasure hunters go should be, on average, places more likely to have treasure. So on that axis, they'd have a consistency. But along a bunch of other axes that don't correlate with that, they would go a bunch of different directions. So then the question is, when we're looking at contrarians go a bunch of different directions, are these just directions in terms of overall style and attention that shouldn't be expected to correlate much with truth here, or you know, when we get to the dimension of are they right, say when we look at a historical database of contrarians in the past, then we might find them that they eventually got to the right answer first or sooner, even though in some naive sense they went all sorts of directions to search.

Aella:

Yeah. Okay. Yes.

Agnes:

I don't think I agree that being contrarian in a lot of different things means that you're only LARPing, because it may be that, like, It may be that you, you know, for instance, you care about something, you develop a weird view, and then you develop, like, as Ayla was saying in the answer to my very first question, there's a kind of pleasure to it or something. There's a kind of, like, enjoyment of noticing that there's some different way of doing something that you might, I mean, you could do that because you want other people to notice that you've done it, but you could just do it because you like it. Like, there might just be people who, like, actually enjoy being contrarian as, you know, as part of their desire profile or something.

Robin:

So I think I want to switch stance from being a distant observer of this contrarian phenomena to embracing me being a contrarian in a certain way, because I think this might go better if one of us tries to defend the point of view of being a contrarian. But I would want to defend the particular kind of contrarian whose stance is, you know, I inherit all these general views about topics that I don't think much about, but if I go and think about a topic, then I expect to come up with a different opinion from the general view after I've thought about it a lot. unless I think about a topic a lot, I'm not going to do that. So I'm going to hold myself to only having or expressing unusual views when I've thought about something a fair bit. And then I'm allowed to do that for more than one topic. I may even do it for a dozen or two dozen topics over a lifetime. But, you know, my stance will be the reason why I'm entitled to sort of embrace my new opinion is because it's the result of more detailed thought about it. And that I do think there'll be a correlation with other people who think about that same topic in similar detail, at least using similar sorts of disciplinary tools, and then that's the kind of good contrarian, and then there'll be others who just do it for the image of liking to look contrarian, and they won't have the same sort of detailed correlations here, and I'm not endorsing or supporting them.

Aella:

Have I endorsed and support just a little bit the social contrarians?

Robin:

Just for the style contrarians?

Aella:

I don't know. I'm kind of pro having a general social balance of doing a thing that's not conformist, but that's minor though. I overall agree with you.

Robin:

I have a post exactly on this topic from many years ago where I say there are people who just want to be different on many things and then they give the other innovators a bad name. That is, there's the usual way of doing something, and then there's different ways of doing things. And if the people who are doing things for different reasons are just doing it because they're random and just liking to be different, then those aren't going to be very useful ways to do it. And in fact, it's better to avoid those people for many reasons. So for example, a heuristic is on the road, any weird car, stay away from. A car that's going slow, fast, wobbling, funny paint job, anything on average, they're going to be correlated with someone who's just not controlling that car as well. Which means that from your point of view, you're better off staying away from that weird car. That's, but you know, some people have weird cars for good reasons. But if there's enough of other people around who just have weird cars because they're just randomly weird people, then in fact, people are justified in staying away from those people. So like for say hiring an employee, right? If you're looking for someone to do a regular job reliably, and you've got some weird things about them, then if on average, unreliability tends to correlate with weird things about a potential employee, then you're better off not hiring weird people. And then the people who are weird for good reasons, they get lumped in with those people unfairly, and we hurt innovation in the world because the people who claim to be innovative are mostly people who aren't actually thinking carefully about their innovations. They're just being weird, and that hurts the cause of weirdness.

Aella:

I mean, I don't necessarily disagree, right? I'm just saying that separately from all of this, I like social balancing urges. And it feels like this kind of comes out of a social balancing urge and that thing I support. If you're in a community where people seem to be way too interested in doing the thing that everybody else is doing, then I appreciate the energy of somebody who's very just deliberately trying not to do that thing. A teenager's going goth. Right. They're weird and everybody's like, oh, you're going through a phase. But I'm glad that exists. I'm glad that urge just exists on the planet. Although I agree that there are downsides. It's kind of a nitpick.

Robin:

But if you think about an ordinary person who's not weird, say, and then they see a weird person and they ask themselves, maybe those people know something I don't. Maybe there's a signal there I should extract. Maybe I shouldn't just reject them because they're weird. That's based on the idea that maybe those people are choosing their weirdness out of some reason and thoughtfulness, rather than just to be weird. The more I believe, no, they're just being weird to be weird, the less I'm looking for a signal there, because it's not there, the more justified I feel in just dismissing them, because they are doing it for a good reason.

Aella:

I feel like it's unreliable, though, to just being weird for the sake of being weird. It's kind of like art. It's just like a novel sensation. Novel sensations are inherently awesome.

Robin:

What do you think, Agnes?

Agnes:

I guess I'm just wondering why the amazing innovators can't give themselves a good name, like through all the great innovations that they're producing, improving the lives of everybody. Because it seems to me that, you know, with respect to other people, there are these two impulses, and I sort of get both of them. And one of them is somehow some people find it reassuring when other people do things the same way they do. And the other thing is, it's kind of nice when people do things in different ways. You see, both of these impulses sort of exist in us, and then they can both generate antipathy towards the other. Like, you can end up with this antipathy towards, why are they doing it differently? I'm somehow threatened by that. Or why is everybody doing everything the same? I'm threatened by that, right? Yeah, I guess I'm not sure where I come down on those two things, but it's not somehow obvious to me that we have to decide that fight in favor of the conformist just to protect innovation. Because as I see it, innovation should sell itself.

Robin:

My story was that there's two kinds of innovation. There's thoughtful innovation, where somebody says, here's a way to do something different for this reason that's promising because I've thought it through. Yeah. And then there's just imitative innovation, which just does something different in order to gain the social credit for being innovative without actually thinking carefully about whether it's a better thing.

Aella:

Can you give an example of these two things?

Robin:

I'm gonna give an example of hospitals, small versus large. It's one of my favorite examples I've given in lectures over the years. On average, if you go to a large or small hospital, you'll get about the same quality overall treatment. But that's somewhat at odds with the following two facts. One is large hospitals do everything that small hospitals do and more. They just have more kinds of treatments they'll do for you. And the second is for any one kind of treatment, Oh, whoever does it the most is better at it. So if you get more gun, you would get gunshot. You want to go to the hospital and gets more gunshots. If you have cancer, you want to go to the hospital has more cancer. So this seems to be at odds with this fact that, so both of these things seem to favor the larger hospital. They, they do more things and each thing they do, they're better at. Nevertheless, on average, they're not better. So the solution to this puzzle is that in fact, the new things that larger hospitals do are on average worse. New things are, on average, worse than old things. However, of course, most new things get thrown away, and a few new things last, and innovation, improvement over time, comes from the few new things that last, even though most new things are bad. So practical advice from this is to get the best treatment, you should go to the large hospital and then only let them do the treatments that small hospitals also do. Cause now you'll get the best of both, but that would be practical advice in that situation. But you can see that the moral of the story is, you know, people are going to the big hospital in part because of their innovative new treatments. But the problem is most of those innovative treatments are worse than the bad old treatments. And that's a problem for the new things. What you want to do is be able to sort out and distinguish the good new stuff from the bad new stuff. So the harder it is to distinguish those things, the harder it is to innovate. The whole innovation process is you try new things and then you distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. you get rid of the bad ones, you keep the good ones. That's the whole process. So we definitely want to prioritize and celebrate distinguishing the good different stuff and the bad different stuff.

Agnes:

Sure, but you gotta do that. The process would be something like the testing of the treatment or something. If somebody's wearing weird clothes to their medical treatment, that's not gonna interfere with that. We have processes for testing, which are the good and which are the bad innovations. And the proof's gonna be in the pudding. Does the people actually survive more with this treatment than with this other treatment? And that's gonna be what sells the innovation.

Robin:

It would if it were true. Unfortunately, our world seems to keep bad innovations for a remarkably long time. And so we could definitely do with stronger sorting of those things.

Agnes:

Okay, but I just find it hard to believe that's because people wear weird clothes to their medical treatments or sing songs while they're getting the treatment or whatever weird things people do. That's not what's muddying this process, is it?

Robin:

But I would say that on the road, if you see that guy singing that song really loud, that does make up a little different. And I'm going to stay a little farther away that on average on the road, most any weirdness is going to be a reason to stay away from some other vehicle. Um, that's not so much true in the hospital. Maybe the weird clothes aren't a problem. Although the surgeon with weird clothes might be a reason to be careful.

Aella:

I feel like I asked for the example to try and distinguish between the two examples you were giving, but then you gave me an analogy and then I forgot what the original two examples I was trying to distinguish before, and so now I feel lost.

Robin:

Maybe I'll come back to you.

Agnes:

I think I remember. It was basically, Robin was saying that we want to be able to distinguish innovation that's just for show or LARPing or whatever, weirdness that's just for show from innovation. And so his example was very roundabout because it wasn't an example of each. It was more an example of a case where The need to distinguish which of the good innovations is very salient, namely in a hospital. But of course, it didn't involve any cases of people doing innovation just for, or weirdness just for show. I threw that in with the people in the weird clothes to make the analogy closer to what we were originally asking about. So the point is, When people are weird in the innovative sense, then there's all kind of investment we want to put into deciding which of those weirdnesses benefit us and which of them don't. And then those of us who are just weirdos generally indiscriminately are like muddying the waters and making the process of weeding out the good from the bad weirdness. That is the innovation from the non-innovation harder to do.

Aella:

So people should, in a sense, have a license to be weird? Like you should only be... Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Agnes:

You should invest the time into studying the thing.

Robin:

Well, hold yourself to a standard, yes.

Aella:

How do you feel about teenage goths?

Robin:

I mean, as long as it's clear they're just making a different style choice, nobody's confused about them having some message that we should listen to. But let's look at, say, UFO fans. Now, UFO fans tend to be weird in many ways, right? They wear weird clothes and have weird styles and meet at weird places and have weird ways of talking about things. And, you know, most traditional serious academics use that to dismiss their claims and their world, right? That is their weirdness counts against them. And it's because of this idea that, you know, they're, they might just be doing it for the fun of being weird. Uh, that's the interpretation offered of them and it kind of fits.

Aella:

Wait, I don't, I feel like, I feel like weirdly like an idiot in this conversation. I'm like, wait, I feel like, uh, like maybe there's some like deep point that I'm missing, but I mean, people discard UFO people's opinions because they're wrong. Like wrong. Like they're clearly like not thinking very well. And so they don't think well in a lot of other different things.

Robin:

I mean, as an academic, I can assure you that we academics often use pretty shallow signals to judge things. We don't just judge people on the quality of their arguments. We often use various, you know, as an example, very early on, I, you know, sent somebody a drafting working paper and he came back and talked to me. He said, look, you, you, you far out of this in two columns, never do that. And it was single space, never do that. You know, he was just walking through, you're going to, no one will ever take you seriously if you format paper this way.

Aella:

which seems so terrible. I get a lot of shit for like, I'm very weird and a lot of the weirdness bleeds off onto my research. I like publish some findings and people are like, we cannot trust this because it is weird in all of these other ways. It's very frustrating. I can't imagine how terrible it would be if you're just doing the formatting wrong.

Agnes:

Well, see, that's what Robin is suggesting, that you police yourself, and you decide which are the kinds of weirdness that are research-relevant, and then squash all the other kinds to make sure you're not giving people a confusing signal.

Aella:

I feel so against this. I feel, like, deeply, meaningfully, like, unjust, kind of, against this.

Robin:

I mean, I feel torn, but I feel like the trade-off is, I can make Vivid, and it's real, and we should face it, and not pretend it isn't there.

Aella:

Yeah, but I kind of feel like I want to change the norms, and in order to change the norms, you have to put yourself on the chopping block a bit.

Robin:

Say I have a two-columned paper. Say I really care about the two-column norm, right? Two-column papers should be allowed against the one-column norm. Okay. Well, my way to do that should be to make papers that are high quality in other ways and then attach them to a two column format. If I make a bunch of really crappy papers on a two column format, I'm reinforcing the norm. The idea would be to be selective about your differences and then focus on making sure you show that there's a way to make that thing different without lowering the quality that people care about.

Aella:

Yes, that seems right.

Robin:

So that's about this story of like trying to have contrarians who are contrarian because we think about things carefully and find a way to distinguish those contrarians from the other contrarians who just do it to be different. That's just like, you know, they're going to make the two column papers and have all sorts of other random stuff that isn't going to impress the audience because they're not trying to impress the audience and do it right. They're just trying to have fun with a lot of variation in the format.

Agnes:

Right. We're making you look bad. But wait, let me shift the question slightly to this. When you do something in a weird way, people often are disturbed by that. And at some deep level, I'm not sure I understand why. Like in the car example, if, I mean, if I just saw a car that had a weird color, I know I would not be inclined to think that's probably a drunk driver or something. If I saw the car weaving or whatever, I might, but it's not like everything about the car is gonna make me draw those conclusions. It's gonna, there's gonna be some, I'm gonna employ some kind of cognitive discipline there. So like, I'll just give an example from my own life of something that people often, that reliably people get upset about, is that I live with my husband and my ex-husband. So we live in the same place. Now, people just find that very weird, very disturbing. That somehow shouldn't happen. But, like, it doesn't... For me, that's like the car being a different color. It's like it's not, it doesn't interface in any way with their lives, and yet they still find it disturbing or threatening or whatever. So why is it that differences that we can pretty clearly tell are like the color of the car and not like the weaving of the car, nonetheless elicit the response that the weaving of the car would?

Robin:

Well, first of all, just notice the general heuristics, much easier to remember, to teach, and to implement. that stay away from all weird cars is just very easy, robust, and reliable to use. And it does work on average. Now you want to offer a subtler refinement of the heuristic where you say, stay away from weird cars that are weird on the following features, but not the other following features. But you haven't given me a criteria to distinguish those that I could easily implement. You've just said that there is some distinction. So until you could offer an easy to check and implement criteria by which I could tell which cards were the ones to avoid, it's not actually a viable option.

Agnes:

Why? Like, in this particular case, it's like, what might be an indication of drunkenness or, like, disorderly driving or something? And like, yeah, I would think the color of the car wouldn't tend to be, but the movements of the car would be.

Aella:

Does it result in, like, meaningfully worse treatment towards you? That when people learn that you have an ex living with you?

Agnes:

Oh, yeah. Interesting. There's a giant, like, social circle that cut me off. What? Yeah. Yeah, no, people are really upset about this. So it really, it really deeply disturbs them.

Aella:

Do they think you're being like polyamorous or something like.

Agnes:

Independently, I am, but I think that that's like a separate issue that's also upsetting.

Robin:

I mean, it might be reasonable for them to expect this correlation. I mean, it's not a crazy correlation to expect, is it?

Agnes:

Right, but I think even over and above that, it's just somehow in their heads, it's just not supposed to happen. There's something very visceral. I mean, this isn't the only thing, I just picked this as a vivid example, but where you experience some difference as a threat to yourself, And maybe Robin's right that the explanation is just we have a general rule. All differences are threatening or something. That would seem like a crazy inefficiency.

Robin:

You have to offer a better one to call that crazy inefficient. You have to offer a way to distinguish the ones to be wherever and the ones not to be. And that's seems pretty hard.

Aella:

I still feel like what hung up on this example, though, I'm like, I can't get past it. I'm like, I'm very surprised. This is not within my models of how people behaved. Did they say why they cut you off?

Agnes:

No. But I think that part of it is people who used to invite us over to dinner stopped inviting us over because they kind of didn't know who to invite over. Oh. It somehow became awkward to socialize with us. um and the problem is just like it's not that people would never speak to me again or something it's just that i was sort of cut out of a certain social circle um which was not a super traumatic for me so i'm just gonna admit um uh but you know this is just it got rehashed recently because it got like you know, reopened. This has been going on for a decade, but it got reopened for the public eye. And then it was like a return of this reaction to something that's just basically atypical.

Aella:

The motivation of this being like a lack of a social script feels a little different to me than like stay away from the car. Like, like, it's just awkward. Like, how do you how do you go up to that person at a party? I don't know. And it doesn't feel like it's I don't know, maybe social script is is part of it. Like, yeah, I think we told how to interact with this.

Agnes:

I think that that's right. So I think that maybe it's a little bit different from the car. So maybe part of the explanation here is that each of us has a job of making ourselves legible to other people, right? So that they can interpret us and we give them signals to teach them how to interact with us. And then the weirder we are, the more confusing those signals are. And so they don't know how to interact with us. And so maybe actually we're like selecting for people who are super socially skilled and who are good at interacting with people on the basis of ambiguous signals or whatever. And then only those people remain, not because they're the most tolerant, but just because they're the most talented.

Robin:

In academia, in the job market, I believe Agnes will confirm this, there's just a habit in many disciplines, probably hers as well, definitely was in economics, where when they're looking at new job candidates, these are people who just finished their PhD, say, and trying for an assistant professor job, a way they describe these candidates as promising is that they can walk the walk and talk the talk. That is, can they just do the style? Do they have the proper mannerisms and vocabulary and pacing and level of detail? They're just supposed to imitate a certain prototypical version of that profession. And the ones who have done that more successfully are just considered better candidates. And they're not being very discriminating about which of these features are closer that matter more for walk the walk. They're not saying this, who cares about anything? Just did they have a better argument? They're looking at all the different features that these people have as clues to have they assimilated our styles and are they a good candidate to be one of us? So you either say they're just doing it wrong or we have to understand why they're doing it and credit them for some reasonable inference they're making.

Aella:

Yeah, I mean, I like the social script frame. It feels pretty intuitive for me. And I mean, so you have to like offer them like a different script by which to interpret what you're doing. It's like branding.

Agnes:

Right. So maybe maybe conformity is just the cheapest form of branding, like it's the easiest, most reflexive, least work kind of branding you can do. Yeah.

Robin:

But let's make it more complicated. In some arenas, part of your brand is being the contrarian. So, I mean, that's for all three of us, actually, to varying degrees. Part of our brand, our distinctive value comes from our being presented as certain kinds of contrarian. But their general disadvantages of being weird are still there for us. So we have to do the subtle thing of being weird in the right ways. with close enough to the right weirdness script. So there's a sort of weirdness script for artists and intellectuals and other sorts of people where that's the kind of script we're supposed to fit. And we need to be weird in some ways to fit that script, but it's dangerous to be weird in too many other ways.

Agnes:

Yes. So do you think, Ayla, that your understanding of yourself as a, that you, that you've like, I don't know, created like a brand of a kind of contrarian that you are where at least some of those practices or modes of being wouldn't be there if they were a part of the brand to make you legible to others. I don't know.

Aella:

There's like some like feedback training thing that happens very subtly over many years. And I don't know what I would be like without that feedback training. I'm not deliberately being like, I'm going to try a weird thing so people will like me. It's just like I put out a whole bunch of data about me and then people react really strongly to some and I get positive reactions to others. I think some part of my brain learned the kind of self that works really well in conjunction with an audience and then sort of leans into this subconsciously.

Agnes:

Still, I wanna ask you about a post that you wrote. It was like, I don't know, a month or two now. I think I have a tab open. Yeah, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet Hate, which was very aspirational for me, because I'm like, maybe I can grow up and become you and be okay with internet hate. But what was interesting to me about that is that you know, you say that, like, at some point you were able to detach in a certain way and you connected that up with, like, were you accepting that you're a symbol, right? And you said, like, you know, it connected up with when you were at vibe camp, you were understanding yourself as a symbol. Yeah. And so I wonder how that relates to this feedback process that you just described. Is it that you arrested that process? Like, is it like, this is it. I've become symbol Ayla. And like, now I'm going to be a little bit immune to further input or something like that. Like up until that point, you were taking input in and then you stopped.

Aella:

I don't know. It's still new, so I'm still learning what it means, really, to accept the being a symbol thing. I think it's a pervasive change. Yesterday, I was on a stream and then I went and I read some internet hate about me and then I was sad, but it was only sad for a little bit and it didn't hit me very deeply. That's a good sign, but I don't know exactly how it changes my perception. I still want to be liked. I think that's quite a universal thing, and it's always going to be an incentive there for me. I would like to do things that reduce the amount of internet hate that I get, but I think the change is mostly just I'm no longer viewing internet hate as some sort of deep violation. It's sort of inevitable. People are going to hate you because they get to reinforce their identity against you. It doesn't matter what your identity is. It can be used to reinforce, so you're always vulnerable in that way.

Robin:

So we know how story characters differ from real people, and it seems like celebrity characters are more like story characters than they are like real people in that way. And so we can use that to understand the kind of pressures that are being put out. The world's trying to make us into celebrity characters or story characters compared to real people. And if we can identify that bias, then we can ask, how much do we want to resist it? So it seems like, for example, it's going to make us more extreme. Story characters and celebrity characters are just more extreme in their stances. They're more simplified. They're less subtle. They're less context dependent. And especially for my concept of the proper sort of contrarian, I want to resist that idea. That is, if the stereotype of me is just, I just pick a weird thing in order to be weird, I want to say, no, no, I'm being selective. Most topics I'm not even going to have an opinion on. I'm only going to have some I've even investigated, and then I'm usually going to pick a relatively ordinary opinion. It's only when I happen to come to an unusual opinion that I'll tell you about it, and then I'm trying to be very selective, but that's a complicated character, and maybe the world just isn't going to hear that character.

Aella:

Yeah. I've had a lot of very mixed feelings about this, but there's one kind of perspective where Uh, like the kind of people who are not going to be nuanced to the way that they view you, like aren't, aren't worth it. I mean, this sounds like kind of dumb, but like they're not, they shouldn't, they shouldn't have like any sort of like impact on the way that you're trying to organize your character.

Robin:

Agnes and I, with her husband Arnold, did an episode recently where we talked about the interpretation of ancient celebrities like Aristotle or something. And we noticed that this concept that, in fact, most of the influence of Aristotle in the world, say, is the caricature of Aristotle, not the actual Aristotle. And that if you're very successful, that's kind of what you have to hope for. And then in that sense, you don't have much hope of this subtle version of you lasting and having influence. The world is going to remember the caricature.

Agnes:

You know, I want to amend that result from our conversation, because I think that. Oh. Hold on. Something bad, just can you guys still hear me?

Robin:

Yeah. I mean, just fine.

Agnes:

Oh, you see me too? Okay. Yeah. Oh, okay. My computer just did a very weird thing. All right. You're back now. If you read an introductory textbook in biology, critical theory, logic, Aristotle's name will often be in the first sentence. And you might say, look, his main influence was creating every branch of knowledge that currently exists. But if you wanna know the name of Aristotle and the way it gets called to mind, that's the caricature, right? So in a way, the question, you could separate out your influence into the causal effects of your existence and the memory of you. And it may be that the memory is gonna be the caricature, but the causal effects could be massive and they may have little to do with the caricature and a lot to do with what you actually wrote.

Aella:

That's hard. I don't like the fact that they're different.

Robin:

Although the causal effects are mostly mediated early in time and then pass off to other people. So there's this issue, why ever read an old writer? Presumably if many other people read the old writer, then they've assimilated whatever insights the old writer had and those have been assimilated into all the writing since then. So what would be the point of reading an old writer? And then the contrary story as well, there's something distinctive about this writing style that you'll get out of reading the old writer that other people couldn't summarize in what they've said. And you might think, well, if I can't express it and nobody else could before, I won't be able to, so what's the point? But again, you would... you might expect that the sort of, you know, effects like Aristotle founding biology, then that was the effect of that has passed through all the biologists since then. We don't need to remember or mention Aristotle for those things. When we mention his name, it'll be because of this caricature, this supposedly thing that you can't get through the other summaries that still last from that person, whatever that is, if there is anything.

Agnes:

I want to go back to the thing Ayla said about, you know, maybe the people who aren't going to be nuanced shouldn't influence how you think about yourself or your plans for yourself. because like so like one of the kind of worries that I had and that occurred to me when I was reading that blog post is that it like on some level you want to say people saying mean things about you is bad like you know the way that you put it of like Hey, I'm a person. You know, you shouldn't be treating me this way. I often have had that like that thought in like those words. And I'm like, that's a there's something right about that thought that I don't want to lose. Like where there's a kind of toughness that is almost like it almost feels to me like it's first of all insensitivity and second of all, like a form of revenge. well, you're not even worth bothering with. Like, you're not important enough for me to even care what you think or something. But actually, I obviously really do because I'm making this whole speech about it. And so how does one, I don't know, turn down the volume without like a kind of counter formation in oneself of the defense against that thing?

Aella:

I think I view this as negative when it is kind of ingrained or stable in a way. One example is once I had a guy come up to me at a party and he was fangirling really hard and he was like, I was so excited, I'll do whatever you want. He was basically self-prostrating really intensely and I felt really sadistic about it. It was very early on, I was shocked by my reaction. Like, with this person being like, just step on me, highness. He wasn't literally saying that, but that was the vibe. I found myself actually wanting to hurt him, which is shocking because typically I'm very nice and compassionate to people. And I'm like, wow, where did this come from? And I think the frame I used to play, he was requesting it. He was putting himself into this social script where the way that I fulfilled the social script is by being cruel. in some way. And so when these people are being mean to me online, and I'm kind of saying this a little more artistically, I don't literally mean it, but there's a way where it feels like they are requesting that I dehumanize them. They're putting me in a social strife where the only way for me to properly fulfill the balance to this reaction is to be like, fuck you. What else the fuck are you? That's just the way that this narrative is supposed to go. And it doesn't mean that I'm fucking them specifically. It's just like, sure. Okay. I'm going to inhabit this role in your story. And maybe the story will change one day. Maybe you are going to have a different perspective. Then that's fine. But it's not about you. It's about the story. And that feels a lot more flexible and healthy for me.

Agnes:

But like the thing that happened with you and that it's fascinating, I mean, and it makes actually now that you've sort of explained it, it makes sense to me that it would incite that, in effect, the corresponding response in you. But one wouldn't exactly want to go through life constantly putting oneself in that position, right? And so there's this question, if you're getting all these responses and then you're having this, you're like, well, they asked me to dehumanize them, so I did. And then you're sort of systematically doing that. That just seems really bad.

Aella:

Yeah. Like, yeah, I don't know. I don't, like, I'm not really sure how to think about it. I don't know how to do it better. But, but also, like, it feels healthier to me, like I said, when it's about the story and it's not about them. Like, like, if you're in a world where every, like, if you're on the opposite end of this, say, like, everybody's treating you like shit. And, like, the way to fulfill this narrative is to grovel at their boot. Like, kind of the reverse. Probably, like, It's probably really exhausting to try and fight that narrative at any step. The ideal is to get out of that. But I don't know. In my ideal, I just don't expose myself to those people.

Robin:

And I offer another distinction of two different kinds of contrarians. Because it occurs to me that, so the kind of contrarian you are, at least from a distance, is there's this range of opinions on this topic, everybody cares about sex, and you're taking one of the well-known positions and then you are representing that position. So there's a sense of which that's contrary to maybe the usual positions, but it's not especially original in the sense that lots of people know about that position, lots of people could represent that position. So some people are selected as celebrities to represent various positions on various axes that many people have opinions on.

Aella:

Just to be clear, what position am I representing here?

Robin:

Well, the position that you are most known for would be, say, in favor of polyamory or a broad, accepting, pleasure-oriented analysis of which choices to make in the area or something. Okay. That would be my rough description, but that's a position that many people are aware of and can intuit that it would make sense as a position, and then you represent it, and then you're a celebrity representing that position. Whereas, say, someone like Wegner, of the guy who introduced Continental Drift, say, he was a contrarian, but he wasn't a celebrity, you know, coming on to a new position that many people already knew about that needed somebody to represent. He was like inventing a whole new point of view that people weren't even aware of, or even Einstein at the beginning. He was, he's a contrarian initially, but not because he represented some views that many people argued over and that there was already a preexisting stance, like he invented a whole new position. And it seems to be like many people trying to be that, there's many people who tried it and failed to be an Einstein or a Wegner. But that's a kind of contrary many people aspire to, but that's different than being a celebrity who represents a widely held point of view. That's still a minority, but a widely known and anticipated and understood point of view.

Aella:

So you say there's like a spectrum of how minority your opinion is, and there's some people that have like a- How established it is.

Robin:

It could be a minority, but still very well known and established, and now you represent it, but you're not inventing it or changing it necessarily.

Aella:

And so- I think I do also argue for a lot of concepts that are pretty out there. I would say don't have any established thing, but people don't really remember those.

Robin:

Right, so there's a conflict. That's hard.

Agnes:

Sorry, can you give us an example?

Aella:

I'm a little afraid. How frequently does this get?

Agnes:

Wait, okay. We're not that popular. Not many people. Though everyone at Vibe Jam listens to us. That's our clientele. But otherwise, I think we're very popular.

Aella:

I think I have very unusual opinions about trauma. I think trauma is almost entirely social. It's including childhood sexual experiences. And so I know some people do share that, but I would consider it to be a much rarer. People don't have like, oh, that's the poly people. They don't have the thing for what I'm saying. I was molested and it was fine. People don't have a concept for that.

Robin:

It might well be, and I would even encourage you, that is, given a position as being a celebrity representing an established position, you could then make bids to become this other kind of contrarian where you invent novel positions and defend them. And it might be that if you got enough people to accept those, then they would now see you as that different kind of person that might even have a better role for you in the world. And I would encourage you to go for it. But I just wanted to distinguish the two.

Agnes:

It turned out this episode was Robin proselytizing to us about his brand of conferrianism and how we should join it. You need a name for it. It's true, Robin, you need a name.

Robin:

So there's this name that people have put next to memes for me called meta-contrarian. We could ask what we think of the concept. Is it coherent? Does it mean anything interesting? So the idea is that some people are just contrarians and other people are like, they look a lot like a contrarian, but then they end up endorsing the usual point of view, but from an unusual perspective. and then they are, you know, contrarians at a meta-level. That is, they're contrary to what you'd expect. That is, they're endorsing many, you know, and kind of interesting, you know, is there a meta-metacontrarian? I mean, is this coherent?

Agnes:

In fact, that distinction cuts across the one you're interested in, because I could be a meta-contrarian about fashion and dress like everybody else, but from a contrarian, my whole reasoning about it is backwards, and then I'd be a meta-contrarian. But I might not have invested any thought into it, and I might not fall under your strict criteria of the work I need to do in order to be allowed to be weird on your system. I feel like you need a name that conveys that. Don't be weird unless you've worked for it. Like a grouchy contrarian? Maybe. Strict. Or maybe strict. Maybe you're just a strict. Strict is good.

Robin:

So I'm awesome to see- Contrarian.

Agnes:

Wait, can you say that again? I didn't hear what you said, Ayla. No fun. Yeah, exactly. No fun. Yeah, fun-free contrarianism. That's what I think you should call it, Robin.

Robin:

Yeah, I think we'll search for another name. But I've often distinguished between being contrarian about methods versus topic or conclusions. So many people in the academic world, they're contrarian on methods. They want to have, you know, they don't believe in the usual axioms or the usual approach. They just want to have a whole different approach. And then others of us, like myself, are more happy to use all the usual methods, but we just want to apply them to unusual questions. where other people haven't actually done so much. And that seems to be safer from the point of view of being accurate or not being wrong. Uh, when, when you're having a country in conclusion, like everybody thinks a, and you're going to think not a, I mean, you might be right, but there's a big chance you're going to be wrong. And if you're doing that because you have contrary methods, I mean, methods are probably also wrong, but I'm just taking the usual methods and applying to a subject. Nobody else is even looking at. seems like I've got a good chance that my first cut analysis will be right. It'll be contrary because I'm speaking about something nobody speaks about, but I'm still quite likely to be accurate.

Aella:

Would you consider rationality to be a contrary method?

Robin:

Well, it depends on what people mean by rationality. So, you know, certainly in the concept of rationality, let's have arguments and discuss things. You know, that's a pretty ancient thing. So in some sense, rationalists... Talk about the new thing. Well, that's the question. What is the new thing? That is, there's this image that there is a new thing.

Aella:

Like the sequences, like Sarcoda, like the Rationality community.

Robin:

And the question is, do they have a different method? Is there a different method there? Or is this just a rebranding of the old method except it's new because we're young and sexy and, you know, in the news?

Aella:

That seems to be non-standard. It seems to be kind of unpopular.

Robin:

But then the question is, what is it about their analysis that's different from the usual sorts of, you know, giving arguments and analysis and reasoning? And I might pitch it the way I just said, rationalists actually take the usual rationality stuff that everybody else already accepts, and they apply it to other things that people don't usually apply it to. And that's, to me, the magic is to just apply it to new stuff.

Aella:

Yeah, I think my question was just calibration for like what you were thinking of when you said a novel method.

Agnes:

We should stop because we're over an hour.

Robin:

Thank you for joining us.

Aella:

Thanks for having me, guys.