reddragdiva:

nostalgebraist:

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

so … what’s the practical difference for the person on the receiving end of the querulousness?

i appreciate that considering the motivation behind a given piece of querulousness may be important to appreciating the querulant as a person, but not necessarily in dealing with it. “you’re just fearful” strikes me as being in danger of inappropriate personalisation of a response (or, as you posit it here, more of a reaction) presented as substantive and issue-based.

what are you positing as an appropriate response to querulous contrarianism in this framework?

I don’t really think this framework can provide any practical advice of that kind.  If the behavior annoys you, it annoys you.  Ultimately I think that has to be dealt with just like any situation where you want to politely disengage from some conversation, and ideally also express your wish not to get into that type of conversation in the future.  (This happens with all sorts of other things – we all have topics we just don’t want to talk about, or tones/styles of speech/writing that sound like fingernails on a chalkboard to us, etc.)

If this framework has any practical upshot, it will be in – sometimes, perhaps – making certain querulents not annoying where they otherwise would have been.  Sometimes what we find annoying about a speech act is the psychology we read into it, and if we see different psychology there, the amount of annoyance may change.

Like, for obvious reasons, I find it really hard to have any kind of good faith engagement with someone if I think they’re trying to get a rise out of me, which is often what this “hey, what if?” behavior looks like.  (Getting into conversations about something like Friendly AI, say, it’s easy to feel like one is being “trolled” – you strongly feels at the outset that the topic is not worth careful investigation given the opportunity cost, but then you think “oh, I’ll look bad if these people make sophisticated arguments and I have nothing similarly sophisticated to say in response,” so now you’re delving into the details of AI futurism and the concept of Friendliness, i.e. exactly what you thought was not a good use of time, and now you feel like you’ve been, well, owned)

But if the intention (in that or many similar caes) isn’t “trolling” or “feeling intellectually superior to people who don’t waste their time thinking about such things,” but is instead this much other much more #relatable thing, involving the other person’s lifelong quest to make some sort of peace with a threatening world, well, that might make the conversation more interesting to have, less like falling for bait, etc.?

(via reddragdiva)

greenrd:

nostalgebraist:

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

This is Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. Making it explicit like this helps to show to people who don’t have OCPD how silly these thoughts are. Strangely though, it might not work to stop a person who already has this manifestation of OCPD from thinking like this. Much like eating disorders, I suppose.

It sounds more like OCD than OCPD to me, if we’re talking about specific disorders?  (I was thinking it was most useful to use “anxiety disorders” as a broad umbrella here rather than singling out any particular one, although my description does sound a lot like OCD in particular, at least according to the stereotypes I have in my head.)

Wikipedia says:

Unlike OCPD, OCD is described as invasive, stressful, time-consuming obsessions and habits aimed at reducing the obsession related stress. OCD symptoms are at times regarded as ego-dystonic because they are experienced as alien and repulsive to the person. Therefore, there is a greater mental anxiety associated with OCD.^[2]

In contrast, the symptoms seen in OCPD, though they are repetitive, are not linked with repulsive thoughts, images, or urges. OCPD characteristics and behaviors are known as ego-syntonic, as persons with the disorder view them as suitable and correct.

The thing I’m describing involves unpleasant anxiety which the “overly careful” behavior attempts to relieve, rather than a sense that those behaviors are straightforwardly the right things to do.  In particular, there’s a focus on averting disaster via these behaviors, which sounds close to “repulsive thoughts, images, or urges.”

(From the DSM-V description of OCD compulsions: “The behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent, or are clearly excessive.”)

There is also a reluctance, in what I’m describing, to generalize from “I should do the behaviors” to “everyone should do the behaviors” – the “everyone else can get away with this, but not me” aspect I described in the OP.  From what I can tell, this is less common in OCPD and may be a factor distinguishing it from OCD.  Diagnostic criteria for OCPD include, in the DSM-V:

Rigid insistence on everything being flawless, perfect, without errors or faults, including one’s own and others’ performance; […] believing that there is only one right way to do things

and in the DSM-IV:

Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).

and in the ICD-10 (which calls it “Anankastic Personality Disorder”):

excessive pedantry and adherence to social conventions [!]

(via greenrd)

The problem with this is that I don’t think you yourself are actually a contrarian at all - you seem like you engage with a wide range of viewpoints but usually end up coming down with a sensible moderate take close to the status quo. Personally contrarianism is definitely a personality flaw of mine and introspection tells me that the stereotype-land psychology you mention is more or less on point in my case.

I think a lot of that is that I usually think I haven’t learned enough about any given topic to feel at all certain about it, and if you need a default fallback position for times when you’re very uncertain, the status quo seems like the natural choice.

There’s also the countervailing effect of the other sort of relevant anxiety, which is about how if I do something that “people don’t like” it will not only make people dislike me (which is not good, but not the main worry) – it would also close me off from many people who could provide useful perspectives, and push me towards a smaller self-confirming circle of like-minded people.  In particular, what I fear is a “once you’re out, you can’t argue your way back in” dynamic – if someone stops thinking it’s worthwhile to listen to you, you can’t say anything to make them reconsider this, because they wouldn’t be listening.  So (according to my nervous temperament anyway): there’s a certain epistemic value to not getting a reputation as a “crackpot” or “controversial figure” or “That Guy.”  (Plus also the moral worry that if a lot of people disapprove of a behavior, it may be morally wrong)

The second kind of worry makes me self-censor, and if I self-censored less, I would (because of the first kind of worry) say a lot more things like “why does everyone think this is obvious???  Can someone please explain it to me?  Arrrgghh”

(On that note, to give a constructive example, can anyone point me to some serious scientific critiques of Cochran and Harpending?  They seem widely dismissed by the mainstream, but I read part of their book and they at least cited real science and sounded plausible to my domain-expertise-lacking ass.  But we all know what sorts of nonsense one can get people to believe by citing lots of scientific papers and trusting that they won’t look all of them up and check out whether they can do the job they’re being put to.  OTOH maybe C&H get dismissed out of hand and shouldn’t.  This is the kind of thing that eats away at me once I find out about it.  I am not really capable of saying “this is fringe science” and then forgetting about it, unless it’s fringe physics/math in which case I can sometimes evaluate it myself)

IMO, an idea that should be more widely spread – not even widely assented to, necessarily, just talked about, possibly as a “controversial thing” – is that contrarianism is often the result of anxiety

More precisely, not contrarianism but “I know what you’re thinking, but – what if this consensus idea were actually wrong?”-ism

In stereotype land, the psychology behind this behavior is either a desire to annoy people from a place of presumed intellectual superiority, or just an interest in intellectual game-playing for its own sake.  But in my experience, I find myself wanting to question consensuses because the alternative feels scary.  If no one really knows why the thing is true and everyone just believes it because other people believe it in a self-confirming web, then what happens when it turns out to be wrong?

The anxiety, in particular, makes this weigh on me in particular even though, as just described, it would be a society-wide failure.  I tend to (irrationally) feel like other people can rely on “what seems sensible” without much risk, possibly due (says the anxiety) to some mystical intuitive faculty that aligns their sense of “what seems sensible” with actual truth – but if I try to do that, I end up ruining everything, and then everyone’s looking at me in horror and pain and asking what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m thinking “well it seemed sensible at the time” but that is not enough, not for me, no, for me only rock-solid nerdy professorial foundations will work, not because I want to be an intellectual, but because I want to not ruin everything

(This almost never actually happens, and when it does it doesn’t happen with anything like the high drama in the previous paragraph, but it feels like it is a danger I must ever be on watch for)

And when I look around me – taking into account of course that I may be projecting my own motivations onto others (I must include nerdy caveats like that one, some people might know how to get by without them but I don’t, you see how it is) – well, it looks to me like a lot of the “contrarians” and “fans of weird ideas” out there have anxiety disorders.  And this makes sense.

Rejecting common knowledge and laboriously replacing it with a nerdy fiddly ground-up programme that either ends up rediscovering the obvious or “absurdly” negating it – this can be intellectual pretentiousness, or a desire to be special, or just poor judgment of how to usefully spend one’s time and energy.  But it can also be what you do because you “know” that if your foundations aren’t rock-solid, they’re going to blow up in your face and also the faces of loved ones and innocent bystanders, even if this never happens to anyone else

If you don’t go back and check whether the oven is on, it’s going to turn out that it was on, because this is how your life works.  If you don’t neurotically plan out your schedules and your schedules-within-schedules and make checklists and proceed in life one carefully regimented step at a time, you are going to make some mistake so stupid that it lies outside of the realm of ordinarily conceivable human behavior, and it will be so embarrassing that you will be cast out from society and gainful employment forever, because this is how your life works.

If you don’t worry over the coherence of your epistemology and your ethics and the reliability of every source you read and the myriad potential for error even in the work of the great scholars and thinkers who have shaped the received wisdom of educated people and the established (established? by whom?) fact that received wisdom in every prior society has contained vast errors and licensed vast injustices and in sum the ever-present possibility that everyone else could just be getting some basic thing (any basic thing) wrong and failing to see reality for what it is,

Real talk though: I think NAB is actually becoming an unhealthy anxiety-related obsessional target for me, like Undertale was a while ago.  This became clear to me earlier on, but I ran with it for a while because it was producing tumblr posts I felt proud of.  But even after finishing up those posts, my brain is still doing the thing, and it’s making it hard to like … relax or read books or do normal stuff like that

(I don’t blame anyone for this, this kind of thing just happens for me every 4-6 months or so, the things it latches onto are in part arbitrary, and in this case I even encouraged it a bit myself)

The upshot for you guys is mostly (1) I’m actually doing a hard commitment not to talk about the book anymore, at least for like say the next month, so hold me to that, and (2) I may start blacklisting “neoreaction a basilisk” and “NAB babble” so if you could tag related posts with one of those, that would be helpful

(I’ll be seeing Esther in person on Tuesday [!!!!!] and then staying with her for a whole month, so that should nip all this in the bud anyway)

I mean, to be fair.  I hardly know any real math.  I majored in physics in undergrad and my Ph.D program has “Mathematics” in the name but the very, uh, “applied” research I do would not be recognized as “mathematics research” by a mathematician.  I enjoy reading “math tumblr” but it’s mostly over my head

That said, uh, I’ve been in a stretch, for a recent while, of basically doing nothing but research except basic life tasks, and somehow my anxious tired irrational (lol) brain is getting itself worked up trying to figure out if all of that work “didn’t count as work” because it wasn’t “real math” enough and, if so, whether working hard on my dissertation is actually, despite all appearances, a bad irresponsible thing

Sorry, I’m being crazy.  I should really take tomorrow off

veronicastraszh:

Evidently there is some “math versus the rationalists” conflict brewing up, and I for one could not be more pleased. This promises one metric fuckton of grade A Tumblr drama.

Bring it nerds!

this conflict makes me anxious because what if, after another day of working on my applied math ph.d dissertation for 10+ hours, i open up tumblr and it turns out i agree with The Rationalists and therefore am Not A Math

Am looking through my anxiety tag because I think there’s a post in there somewhere that can point me to a paper that could be helpful with work (I was being anxious about the existence of this paper at some point long ago)

And what strikes me is that I seemed to have a lot more problems with anxiety 1-2 years ago then I do now.  At least measuring by how much I post about them on tumblr, but even then, I just basically no longer have the sorts of “awful days” I used to post about, not in the same way.

A usual answer would be “the meds are working,” but I was taking the meds back then too.  (Well, I was taking Lexapro, but not Wellbutrin, so maybe Wellbutrin’s working.)

Maybe it’s Esther.

consulo-cuniculos:

nostalgebraist:

I’ve been thinking about what I want tagged, and the closest first stab I’ve come up with is “culture war stuff.”  Preferably “#culture war cw” or the like so I can just blacklist the phrase “culture war,” and also so it’s not specific to me and others can use it if they want.

Unfortunately, “culture war” is not as clearly defined as many things that people tag for.  If you’re not familiar with the term at all, Wikipedia’s article is pretty good.  The prototypical examples is people arguing for or against “traditional” anything.

Not all politics falls under “culture war” – basic and specific stuff like “Trump’s doing well” or “I’m scared of Trump” doesn’t, nor does stuff about economic policy or (usually) foreign intervention.  Any political topic where the phrase “way of life” would naturally turn up is probably a culture war topic.  Culture war topics may have policy implications, but they are fundamentally about how we live our lives and how others live them very differently.

Mere mention of culture war topics is not itself tag-worthy; the “war” part is also crucial.  This can take the form of people actually arguing about the different sides, but also of people talking about how horrible / stupid / etc. the other side is.

Taking “culture war positions” without fighting or alluding to the conflict is fine.  For instance, “can gay people be good parents” is seen as a culture war topic, but positive stories about gay parents are fine.  Much of the positively framed LBGTQ content on this sight would be seen as “culture war” stuff by someone on the other side, but I’m fine with it.  Posts about another black person getting killed don’t get tagged, but arguments over the pros and cons of the Black Lives Matter movement do.  Description of a single event that relates to feminism somehow is fine, discussion of large schisms within feminism are not.

The line here is mostly about conflict or the reminder that a topic is often the cause of conflict.  Generally, personal emotions or reports of individual stories are OK.

If this makes it any clearer, the reason this stuff bothers me specifically is that I have a lot of worries about how to be moral in a world where people have so many conflicting opinions, and I always feel like it’s too audacious to say that I “know better than” some great mass of people who disagree.  Culture war stuff reminds me of this very directly.  I tend, to a fault, to want to please everyone, and when I’m reminded that I’m in a bunch of situations where I have a choice between “these millions of people think I’m evil scum, or these other millions of people think I’m scum,” I frantically spin my mental wheels trying to find a (non-existent) solution.

Do you “want to please everyone” because you have “a bias to interpret ambiguous information in a threat related manner”? If so there may be other approaches to the problem.

No, it’s a different and long-standing issue.  “#a bias to interpret ambiguous information in a threat related manner” is my general tag for anxiety-related posts.  I chose it because it was a phrase from an academic paper on anxiety that I liked, but it isn’t always related to what I’m talking about in a post with the tag.

(via consulo-cuniculos-deactivated20)

I’ve been thinking about what I want tagged, and the closest first stab I’ve come up with is “culture war stuff.”  Preferably “#culture war cw” or the like so I can just blacklist the phrase “culture war,” and also so it’s not specific to me and others can use it if they want.

Unfortunately, “culture war” is not as clearly defined as many things that people tag for.  If you’re not familiar with the term at all, Wikipedia’s article is pretty good.  The prototypical examples is people arguing for or against “traditional” anything.

Not all politics falls under “culture war” – basic and specific stuff like “Trump’s doing well” or “I’m scared of Trump” doesn’t, nor does stuff about economic policy or (usually) foreign intervention.  Any political topic where the phrase “way of life” would naturally turn up is probably a culture war topic.  Culture war topics may have policy implications, but they are fundamentally about how we live our lives and how others live them very differently.

Mere mention of culture war topics is not itself tag-worthy; the “war” part is also crucial.  This can take the form of people actually arguing about the different sides, but also of people talking about how horrible / stupid / etc. the other side is.

Taking “culture war positions” without fighting or alluding to the conflict is fine.  For instance, “can gay people be good parents” is seen as a culture war topic, but positive stories about gay parents are fine.  Much of the positively framed LBGTQ content on this sight would be seen as “culture war” stuff by someone on the other side, but I’m fine with it.  Posts about another black person getting killed don’t get tagged, but arguments over the pros and cons of the Black Lives Matter movement do.  Description of a single event that relates to feminism somehow is fine, discussion of large schisms within feminism are not.

The line here is mostly about conflict or the reminder that a topic is often the cause of conflict.  Generally, personal emotions or reports of individual stories are OK.

If this makes it any clearer, the reason this stuff bothers me specifically is that I have a lot of worries about how to be moral in a world where people have so many conflicting opinions, and I always feel like it’s too audacious to say that I “know better than” some great mass of people who disagree.  Culture war stuff reminds me of this very directly.  I tend, to a fault, to want to please everyone, and when I’m reminded that I’m in a bunch of situations where I have a choice between “these millions of people think I’m evil scum, or these other millions of people think I’m scum,” I frantically spin my mental wheels trying to find a (non-existent) solution.