2x2 idea: weird/normal, optimist/pessimist.
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Weird Pessimist is the malcontents. Edgy, nihilist, sarcastic, making art about how fucked up things are.
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Weird Optimist is absurdist whimsy. It seems kind of a missing affect these days, but I remember it from, say, Flaming Lips-era indie pop, or early BoingBoing. “Whee! So random and bizarre! I love it! The squares are missing out!”
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Today a lot of Weird Optimist stuff feels cringey and clueless. Sex-positive 2000’s blogs? Yikes, you can’t just talk about how great sex is, it *isn’t* great for rape victims. And that’s true, but...now there’s a positive side of the human experience you don’t hear from.
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Twee, poetic, absurdist aesthetics (think Decembrists or peak Wes Anderson)? They feel “pretentious” or “self-indulgent” today.
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Weird Pessimist stuff can read as “what a perverse jerk”; Weird Optimist stuff reads as “what a clueless prat”. Foolish. Silly.
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Most online content I see is fights between different factions of Weird Pessimists, with Normal Optimists stepping in to tell others not to be so “negative” or to add jokes, cute animals, or promotional materials.
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Once in a while Normal Pessimists pipe up to tell everyone how much they suck.
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HPMOR and the LessWrong Sequences were firmly Weird Optimist, which is why I think they’ve gotten so much flak in recent years. Robin Hanson, though, has always been Weird Pessimist, like most public intellectuals. And EA is a Normal Optimist movement.
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Crooked Timber and Harper’s are Weird Pessimist publications. Most academics in the humanities are Weird Pessimists.
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