Twee, poetic, absurdist aesthetics (think Decembrists or peak Wes Anderson)? They feel “pretentious” or “self-indulgent” today.
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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I thought you explicitly included some fiction in the Weird Pessimist category? I also don't understand how Wes Anderson or the Decembrists get tagged as optimists, it seems like basically ALL they talk about is how fucked up things are.
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By contrast, Crooked Timber is the place where someone read Red Plenty expecting a happy ending: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/01/red-plenty-my-brush-with-brezhnevism/ …
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