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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Safety Dance and Weird Al are Weird Optimist.
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Stoner and raver culture are Weird Optimist.
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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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Early MIRI and HPMoR and the Sequences seem clearly Weird Pessimist by your description.
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Disagree! They did criticize, but they weren’t primarily works of criticism. HPMOR is (humorous and whimsical) fiction; MIRI intended to singlehandedly solve AI by doing math; the Sequences aimed to explain and develop a theory.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman
They’re creative acts. Moreover, they don’t strike the note of “as we all know, society is fucked” but rather the shonen anime note of “the odds are against us but if we make an extraordinary effort we might succeed.”
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman
I think some of the founding insights into human irrationality — Tetlock etc — come from a Normal Pessimist place (“if you hold most people to a fair rational standard, they fail”) coupled with Normal Optimist technocracy (“we can identify and train superforecasters”)
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