Narcissistic Contrarianism

Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

Yes.

So you have a criteria for being skeptical of (I won't say "explaining away", which would be presumptuous) my arguments having to do with the style of my argument rather than its content.

No, I am criticising the content of your argument. You are calling for a refusal to engage with arguments you specifically concede are apparently persuasive ("dazzle their fans"), because they might lead to "unproductive avenues of thought", based on an evidence-free assertion that their originators just want to be different. You provide no basis for distinguishing "narcissistic contrarians" from people who sincerely take non-mainstream positions. You do not have special insight into the internal minds of your opponents.

I'm content to engage with Camille Paglia and Nicholas Taleb and conclude they're wrong. I don't need to go further and engage in armchair psychoanalysis of people I've never met.

Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

Yes. (At least with a plausible guess at what you're aware of.) The point is precisely the observation you make that these are three descriptions of the same behaviour; the implied criticism here is that you (or some hypothetical person who somewhat resembles you) chooses very differently-biased descriptions of the same behaviour depending on whether it's your own or someone else's. (The comparison is of course with irregular verbs in natural languages -- I am / you are / he is. The main point is the difference between the "I" and "he" versions, the "you" typically being something intermediate.)

So it's more or less an accusation of insincerity. Salemicus is suggesting that you are hostile to some varieties of eclecticism when other people do them, but not when you do the same yourself. (I have no idea what evidence, if any, he has.)

Does "irregular verb" have some metaphorical connotation I'm not aware of?

Yes. In the context it describes a situation when the same condition (characteristic, feature, position, etc.) is evaluated very differently depending on whether it's held by the speaker himself (I am), someone close to him (You are), or a third party (He is).

Here is a crude version: I am an original thinker, you are a weirdo, and he is insane.

You seem to follow with 3 likely different interpretations of the same behavior.

The key thing is the pronoun. Nobody thinks of himself as a narcissistic contrarian. They rather think of themselves as a deep and original thinker.

I'm extremely intellectually compulsive if I do say so perhaps immodestly

To break a little bad news, calling yourself "intellectually compulsive" really isn't complimenting yourself.

The Official Ideology is that a concern for the truth is an overriding value, quite like how purity and obeying God are overriding values to the religious. In the Official Ideology, what everyone professes to believe, there is a certain status given to zealots for Truth, just as there is a certain status given to zealots for God.

Stripped of the ideology, ideas are a means to accomplishing things in the world. Indulging in a compulsion to tidy them up regardless of any intent or plan to use them is intellectual OCD, mental masturbation, or both, depending on the precise drive/reward structure of the compulsion.

Well, here I am, still interacting with you. Maybe my kung fu is being beaten, maybe not

Well, as you yourself say, you're kind of intellectually compulsive, so that you have the diligence of the zealot, and wouldn't be one of the less diligent who stop when their arguments stop winning, or the even less diligent, who just don't care if their arguments win or not.

I'd note that I've been following the Official Ideology by characterizing the compulsion to tidy up ideas as "diligence". Engaging in compulsive activity is not diligence. The road to recovery is long for Ideaholics.

The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn't pay rent). Most of the people you could be listening to aren't profitable, but also won't lead you astray: you'll just go on the same regardless. In the final percentage point there are still a lot of confusing opinions that various smart people have, in regards to diet, morality, education, exchethera, but at that point I think it's usually more productive to cross reference the specific opinions rather than look at people as contrarians or not. If you can't cross-check a belief either through reference to other sources, or through your own studies or experience, then it probably isn't relevant one way or the other.

Appeal to authority is perfectly reasonable when you're appealing to a person who trusts the authority you're appealing to. His reasons for that trust may be good or bad, but that appeal constitutes evidence to him.

If Kahneman says Taleeb changed his views, I take that as evidence in favor of Taleeb's ideas being worth looking at.

I came to LW largely because of the converse - the references to Jaynes and Korzybski was evidence to me of good intellectual taste.

This was so dumb. Gelman which is the bayesian statistics textbook Less Wrong recommends from/author of says this

http://andrewgelman.com/2007/04/09/nassim_talebs_t/

"That said, I admit that my two books on statistical methods are almost entirely devoted to modeling “white swans.” My only defense here is that Bayesian methods allow us to fully explore the implications of a model, the better to improve it when we find discrepancies with data. Just as a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg, Bayesian inference is just a theory’s way of uncovering problems with can lead to a better theory. I firmly believe that what makes Bayesian inference really work is a willingness (if not eagerness) to check fit with data and abandon and improve models often."

That told me that you are making such a crippling interpretation, that you have not read any of the works, and you have no idea what you are saying. If all you got was that statement, you are severely behind. Please tell me why you think antifragility is a packaged name, or whatever you are saying.

I'm seriously cringing at why you even mentioned bayesian in this. It's so funny, "Bayesians" almost never know probability theory, large deviations, cramer conditions, non-ergodicity etc etc. They know absolutely no extreme value theory.

By the way, assuming your probability distribution via monte-carlo sampling will be robust to time has been demonstrated false over and over again.

anti-fragility is related to jensen's inequality which is related to a larger class of functional inequalities, and related to information theory.

I'm willing to talk to you this over time and generate a discussion to see what you mean, but from first glance, you have not read any piece of work or have completely misrepresented his work. Statements like that are why people don't know what they're saying.

"Bayesian's" especially people who dostatistics have such a malnourished view on convergence of limit theorems that I wonder what they're even talking about. It takes too long to establish convergence. Even Jaynes gets that wrong in his book.