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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Anybody who hates “kitsch” or “platitudes” or “sanitized” content is a Weird Pessimist. The people who produce that content are Normal Optimists.
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Normal Optimist things: most mainstream media, Disney, corporate PR, technocracy, performing personal excellence (like fitness or mental/emotional health), explicitly calling for “positivity”, etc.
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Neo-Nazis are Weird Pessimists but Hitler’s Nazis were Normal Optimist/Pessimist hybrids.
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Triumphalist aesthetics are Normal Optimist. If it’s in primary colors and has the Imperial Eagle on it? Normal Optimist.
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Normal Pessimism is pretty rare in discourse but very common in real life. Anybody who is busy working hard to survive and has little patience for nonsense is Normal Pessimist.
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Though it's not always practiced by people in conditions of danger or scarcity, I think some of the ethos of engineering and physical/mathematical sciences is Normal Pessimist. Intense conscientiousness. (There's also a Weird Optimist madcap creativity aspect to those fields.)
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Weird Pessimism judges people for being disingenuous or unreflective. Normal Pessimism judges people for being incompetent.
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Likes to identify as "nonjudgmental" but in reality judges people for not being happy or "winners".
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @john_collins_ET
Weird Optimism also identifies as "nonjudgmental" but in reality judges people for being boring or mean. The way little kids think adults are dull killjoys.
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