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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Replying to @ben_r_hoffman
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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
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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Replying to @ben_r_hoffman @s_r_constantin
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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Replying to @ben_r_hoffman @s_r_constantin
I don't see how you can describe the Sequences as *not* "edgy/dark". The Jeffreyssai stories are all about a shadowy conspiracy attempting an impossible task that will definitely fail every time. Much of the nonfiction is explicitly about how everyone is fucking everything up.
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Yes, I take it back, Weird Pessimist includes fiction and art. I still stand by my assessments. They’re not defined by my (imperfect) Twitter definitions, they’re attempts to point at clusters I see. And the Sequences really do have an underlying optimism.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman
It can be optimistic to say people are fucking up if you view that as an opportunity to do better. Optimism here isn’t exactly the right word. For example lots of articles that are very upset about Trump are Normal Optimist.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ben_r_hoffman
Crooked Timber isn’t always sad but it is...sort of engaged in a process of eternal criticism, maybe that’s it? It doesn’t conceive of a state beyond critique as a good thing? Weird Pessimists think criticism *is a form of appreciation*.
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