[lbo-talk] Daniel Davies on Contrarians w/o Cojones

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Oct 25 22:30:16 PDT 2009


http://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/

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

by Daniel on October 22, 2009

I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I'm

disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money

than me out of the practice aren't sticking to the unwritten rules of

the game.

Viz Nathan Mhyrvold:

<quote>

Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an

issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you're in

a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything

becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes

secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What

should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl.

<unquote>

Okay, point one. The whole idea of contrarianism is that you're

"attacking the conventional wisdom", you're "telling people that their

most cherished beliefs are wrong", you're "turning the world upside

down". In other words, you're setting out to annoy people. Now opinions

may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do - I think it's

fantastic - but if annoying people is what you're trying to do, then

you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do.

If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you're in a

fight. It's the definition of passive-aggression and really quite

unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react

passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your

standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a

calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something

like: "Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2

Shielding", and the book would have sold about five copies.

<end excerpt>

rest at: http://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/

Michael



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