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At the current moment, I’m not interested in having to be the arbiter for deciding what is true for particularly complex topics. (Indeed, the research has nothing to do with this question, as it's about testing the persuasiveness of ARGUMENTS -- contrarian and conventional are just two factors that are varied). Initially, I was interested in only generating contrarian positions that were decidedly untrue (eg vaccines cause autism, or the moon landing was faked), versus more ambiguous contrarian positions, but most of what I’m interested in are the unpopular views that are plausibly compelling — at least on the first hearing.

The problem is that I can’t possibly have the expertise to discern which of the contrarian positions are true, and if I were to try to independently arrive at my own conclusions, I would invariably end up deferring to experts and authorities on the subject, which would, in most cases, be the non-contrarian position. My current simple method for operationalizing contrariness is simply looking at how popular a given belief is, across the relevant social groups you ascribe to.

Yet you dare expressing it on LessWrong? What's "in public" then? Soap box on the street?

Are you saying that warming is better for somepeople (eg in colder countries) or overall?

BTW, if you can refute it and get published there is a $100k prize waiting!

Just so you know, whenever I hear that there's prize money for refuting a conspiracy theory, I immediately lower my probability that the conspiracy theory is true. I've encountered numerous such prizes from conspiracy theories in the past, and the general pattern I have seen is that the prize is being offered disingenuously, since the person offering it will never concede. I've (perhaps unconsciously) labeled anyone unaware of this pattern as either (1) purposely disingenuous, or (2) not very smart about convincing people of true things. Both (1) and (2) are evidence of a failure in their reasoning (but obviously this argument isn't airtight).

That list includes the United States, so it clearly can’t be a list of countries with mandatory national service.

If none of the smart se­ri­ous peo­ple can do it be­cause we’re ter­rified that the me­dia (or Twit­ter, or /​r/​SneerClub) can’t tell the differ­ence be­tween us and Stu­art An­der­son, then we’re dead.

The cynical hypothesis is that the media (or Twitter, or /r/SneerClub) fundamentally do not care about the difference between us and Stuart Anderson, and even if they can tell the difference, it doesn’t matter.

But more importantly—

… if there is to be such a thing as an art of ra­tio­nal­ity, the smart se­ri­ous ver­sion of the dis­cus­sion … needs to hap­pen some­where.

Suppose you were asked to briefly describe what such a place (which would, by construction, not be Less Wrong) would be like—what would you say?

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This seems like you're defining "depriving half the population of agency" as not requiring or being violence

Can you say more about what you mean by ‘engagement’?

'choose'

the overwhelming majority of humans take the best option they think they can get.

The CDC has data on promiscuity and pair bonding (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf). I can find no data that indicates neutral or positive effects for promiscuity.

The study focuses on STI rates. How would promiscuity possibly improve these rates?

It seems to me that when pressed on the compact claim you made above, you just made a lot more claims (as pjeby pointed out).

So, your response to my questioning your premises is to propose more premises?

Men do not favour a minority of women

What? Of course they do. I'm a man, I would think I would know if I favored the majority of women. I don't. Similarly, you state that "men" require reproductive opportunity. I don't. I don't want children. So I'm a trivial counterargument on both counts.

These seem to me like trivial refutations of large portions of your ideas about men, without even getting to such notions as "what social contract?" "Who made this contract with whom?" Or, for example:

Good luck trying to wring 60 solid years of slavish labour from a man that has checked out of the race and just wants to play xbox.

My response to that is, why on earth would I want to? I'm similarly baffled as to what value you see in the constructs you see as decaying. Many of them seem like things I'm more than happy to see us rid of. For example:

birth rate crash of the West

I'm not sure why I should see fewer people existing as a problem. Perhaps the people that do exist will be ones who feel wanted, rather than that they are being born into a society that expects them to do things they don't want in order to preserve a society full of people doing things they don't want to preserve a society full of... endlessly recursive suffering. If that is what children have to look forward to, then it's better they not be born in the first place. (Which is one of the reasons I'm not interested in having children.)

Another random point:

search for pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio on beaches with models. He's coming up on 30 years of dozens of models a week (although he does share them with his friends, so that's nice of him).

Does he have a collection that he keeps locked away in a harem? If not, he's not stopping them from pursuing "reproductive opportunities" with other men. Lots of women might enjoy a weekend with Lenny D, but a lot fewer actually want to stick around and have kids with him. Plus, that's what, 18000 women? There are still four billion left. There could be a thousand Leo DiCaprios not sharing any of those women and that's still only like one major city populated by women you no longer want to sleep with because apparently sleeping with more than one guy is (somehow?) a problem in some way I don't understand... and then there's still billions left.

And another thing:

virtually all women that want sex are getting it

On behalf of virtually every woman I have ever known... bwahahahahahahaha. Ha. No. No, no, no, no.

This is obviously, trivially false, as can be shown by observing the billion-dollar industries known as "romance novels" and "vibrators". (Let alone "Fifty Shades"... and for the two previous generations' versions, "Nine and a Half Weeks" and "Story of O".)

See also the research showing the main reason women are less likely to respond to random propositions than men do, is because they have a lower prior expectation for a randomly-selected man being a good lover. That is, they expect that on average, sex with a guy is a crapshoot with regard to the quality of the experience, such that they're better off going home to curl up with a good book and a vibrator.

(Which is one reason that a guy who is discovered to be even halfway decent in bed will sometimes get passed around a woman's circle of friends like a party favor... regardless of what the guy looks like on their OKCupid. The fact that people judge books by their covers should not be construed as them not caring about the contents, in situations where the cover is the only thing available to them to judge by!)

Anyway, none of these things are at all consistent with the idea that "virtually all women that want sex are getting it".

many men that want sex are not getting it

And? So? We live in a world where you can jack it to almost anything you can imagine... for free! Or you can pay a cam girl to act it out for you, or even hire an actual live person to do something for you.

So if what you are calling "sex" is not one of those things, it's not actually sex that's being sought, but something else that you can't actually buy... like love, or appreciation, or respect. (Which making more sex available will not give you, if it's from someone who resents you for making them, or who sees you as an obligation.)

Honestly, this whole thing sounds to me like, "women should want to have sex with me because social contract, blah blah". And my response is, why should they want to? If you're making a contribution to society, surely you have something you can contribute to them, personally, that they value? Arguing that another market participant should value something different than what they actually value, is not very good marketing, so it's not surprising your product isn't selling in that case.

I mean, as far as I can tell, 99% of this is "women want the wrong things, in my opinion, and should want things that benefit me", and/or "society should be restructured to force women to want the things that benefit me", with most of the rest being chaff and smokescreens for that fundamental point of view.

But if the person reading your arguments doesn't have the same value system as you, none of that is meaningful. All I can hear is "people should be made to want the things I do, or at least forced to do them whether they want to or not", which to me doesn't distinguish between you and J Random Fundamentalist of whatever religion.

the labour of one sex was the payment for the other

See, this is what continues to baffle me. If what you want is ownership of a sex partner, you can have that consensually, too, in this day and age. There exist plenty of women who want this arrangement just because it's their fetish, too, let alone the vast number of women who still live in cultures where that's just the done thing (if that's the sort of dubcon that gets you off). So if that's what you want, why not just go get it, instead of insisting that everyone must do it that way, or else? If that's what floats your boat to the tune of 60 years of backbreaking work or whatever, hey, go for it.

But that doesn't mean everybody else wants to live in a world that revolves around ownership fetishes.

I can't help but feel there's some kind of fundamental thing I don't "get" about people with this type of "men don't get enough sex" argument. The weird thing about it to me, is that it seems like an example of the same sort of argument that radical feminists make, i.e. "the other sex isn't doing it right, so let's make them".

Not, "how can we give them what they want to get what we want", but "how can we make them see how wrong they are to not value the same things?"

I really don't get it, especially since I apparently don't value the same things as either group of "the other sex is doing it wrong" people.

Given I specifically cautioned against people raising their own 'solutions' as objections

I don't understand. Where have I proposed a "solution" to your stated problem? I don't believe the problem you stated actually exists to begin with (or at least is not being stated coherently), so I don't understand how I have raised a solution as an objection.

Women aren't useless but let's not pretend they have equivalent utility to men.

Ok, this is just weird to me. Apparently, it's super important that women have children (because men want that), and men dying is bad. But when women take the risk of dying (by getting pregnant), this is not as important or valuable to society?

By your own arguments this makes no fucking sense. If the guy's prize for working is "me get woman", then how is the woman in that equation not of equivalent utility to the man her (literal) labor births, cares for, and raises to the point he can work, not to mention the part where, if she is also payment for his work, then her mere existence must be at least of equivalent worth, within your own framework!

So if, in today's society, the woman does all the same stuff she'd have done in a patriarchal society, and also makes some direct contributions in a job, isn't that a net gain for "society"?

(TBH, I don't even grok "society" as a coherent entity. Small towns can have a "society", churches can, and other small cultural groups. But "society" as a unified entity in the US started collapsing at least as of the advent of cable TV and the death of prime time, let alone the birth of the internet. The world is much more transactional now: more a marketplace than a society as such. If you were going to stop this trend, you would have needed to start by preventing the death of the "company man" with the collapse of pensions and lifelong expectation of employment, that started a few decades ago and birthed the "free agent" economy that has replaced the previous "society" now in all matters, not just those of employment.)

Good luck try­ing to wring 60 solid years of slav­ish labour from a man that has checked out of the race and just wants to play xbox.

At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if you've ever been in an IT department. The coding world contains significant numbers of single men who make money to pursue hobbies. And not all work is "slavish". The best-rewarded kinds are often intellectually stimulating as well.

I downvoted because I think the benefit of making stuff like this socially unacceptable on LW is higher than the cost of the OP getting one less response to their survey. The reasons it might be " strong-downvote-worthy had it appeared in most other possible contexts" still apply here, and the costs of replacing it with a less-bad example seem fairly minimal.

I understood OP as looking for unpopular beliefs that many people have; not only one random person. I've never heard anyone have this belief before so I think, therefore, it does not apply.

Not that clearly? I agree that Anderson is using vague, morally-charged (what constitutes "progress"?), and hyperbolic ("everything in society"!?) language, but the comment still has empirical content: if someone told you about an alien civilization in which "blerples do the bulk of the work when it comes to maintaining society, but splapbops' agency causes there to be nothing to pay the blerples with", that testimony would probably change your implied probability distribution over anticipated observations of the civilization (even if you didn't know what blerples and splapbops were).

It's a question about value, not fact. "Bias" is not even a criticism here; value is nothing but bias.

Playing the devil’s advocate:

It should be pointed out that it’s possible to agree with most or all of your predictions, while disagreeing with their valence, or in other words, to say: “Yes, all these things indeed are likely to happen—and that’s a good thing!”

I do not endorse this view myself, but it’s important to realize that many people do, and such people would respond to your points in ways somewhat like the following:

Where are we to get our peo­ple from, if not from our own cit­i­zenry? …

“Our society has no greater value than anyone else’s, and replacing our citizenry and our culture with other people is not inherently problematic in any way.”

We know the recipe for kil­ling pop­u­la­tion growth, and we’ve de­ployed it suc­cess­fully in Africa (and by ac­ci­dent, here too): ed­u­ca­tion for girls fol­lowed by em­ploy­ment (and you don’t even need birth con­trol to see the dra­matic effects).

“This is not only not a problem, it is a positive good; what you describe is indeed the recipe for the liberation and empowerment of women.”

… and so on.

I bring this up only to remind everyone in this conversation to keep a very firm grasp on the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.