#psybersecurity

Huh, yeah, I see what you mean

The problem with this is that I don't think you yourself are actually a contrarian at all - you seem like you engage with a wide range of viewpoints but usually end up coming down with a sensible moderate take close to the status quo. Personally contrarianism is definitely a personality flaw of mine and introspection tells me that the stereotype-land psychology you mention is more or less on point in my case.

I think a lot of that is that I usually think I haven’t learned enough about any given topic to feel at all certain about it, and if you need a default fallback position for times when you’re very uncertain, the status quo seems like the natural choice.

There’s also the countervailing effect of the other sort of relevant anxiety, which is about how if I do something that “people don’t like” it will not only make people dislike me (which is not good, but not the main worry) -- it would also close me off from many people who could provide useful perspectives, and push me towards a smaller self-confirming circle of like-minded people.  In particular, what I fear is a “once you’re out, you can’t argue your way back in” dynamic -- if someone stops thinking it’s worthwhile to listen to you, you can’t say anything to make them reconsider this, because they wouldn’t be listening.  So (according to my nervous temperament anyway): there’s a certain epistemic value to not getting a reputation as a “crackpot” or “controversial figure” or “That Guy.”  (Plus also the moral worry that if a lot of people disapprove of a behavior, it may be morally wrong)

The second kind of worry makes me self-censor, and if I self-censored less, I would (because of the first kind of worry) say a lot more things like “why does everyone think this is obvious???  Can someone please explain it to me?  Arrrgghh”

i'm not picking up on what made this so particularly funny. i'm guessing you think that jim's "shit test" explanation for the other dude being freaked out isn't accurate and there's some other obvious hilarious explanation but i'm not sure what it is?

A lot of what I was laughing at was in incidental details of the phrasing, etc., but yeah his description of that situation struck me as funny -- it just seemed so under-determined by the observed facts.

What we know is that (1) she was attracted to the guy, (2) the guy was disturbed by something she said and didn’t want to interact with her after that.  Parsing this as “beta” behavior strikes me as especially strange because if anything it looks to me like the guy wasn’t desperate enough to persist with a woman who gave him bad vibes -- if anything, it looks like he was aware he had options and didn’t “have to” keep flirting with a woman who freaked him out in that way.  But even that is just my own immediate intuitive response, and really neither Jim nor I can know with any certainty what was going on there, IMO

Meanwhile Jim’s outlook weirdly leaves men unable to have “nope, I’m outta here” criteria without relinquishing their “Alpha” status, which doesn’t seem like a recipe for anyone’s happiness (or even sexual satisfaction, like dude, you realize that if you’re flirting with a woman and it’s not going well, you could always stop and flirt with some other woman, right?)

Yeah, I remember seeing that ask too, and I agree.  For some reason I still have a hard time giving up the idea that the “admire harlequins” / Pale Fire quote thing was just a coincidence.