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How is your "infect people deliberately" and "infect people gently" extreme contrarianism going to be proven right, though?

I for one don't think much anyone will try it, save for maybe some of your readers getting themselves infected in a very ill controlled way (e.g. when handling the materials).

The ordinary mortality rate of this disease is quite low, especially in healthy individuals who might try self experimenting, so the utility is dominated by probability of increasing the mortality risk.

And if attempted, I don't see how it would possibly out-race actual vaccines (already in the testing phase).

Determining the dose, testing safety, testing efficacy, that all is made immensely more difficult by having potential for infecting non participants such as e.g. hospital workers when a participant needs to be intubated.

Manufacturing is as or more difficult (live virus, stringent dose controls).

Far far smaller therapeutic window (if it even got a therapeutic window at all, which isn't a given), that's more lengthy experiments. Efficacy studies are particularly lengthy.

My concern is solely that people get hurt because of irresponsible contrarianism, I don't see it as a realistic possibility that you can get proven right about any of that.

I guess the one appeal is that you can be contrarian and not be proven wrong if nobody tries.

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"But, what if non-contrarian conformists know that (certain types of) contrarians can often be more right, but conformists see that they tend to win by getting more attention & affirmation in the moment by staying in the Overton window and saying stuff near what most others think at the time?"

This is a great analysis, but one thing (I think?) you're leaving out is that contrarians may often be more right, but they also may often be more wrong. When the stakes are high, their wrongness is a big risk, so that's also a reason conformists could want to muzzle contrarians.

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More tolerance when stakes are low, less when stakes are high—this is just what one would expect from a society of rational people. More tolerance when the outcome lies in the far future, less when the outcome is temporally near at hand—this pattern is inconsistent with widespread rational pursuit of truth: it shows a widespread concern with one’s own social status rather than with finding the truth.

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Speaking of contrarians (and economics-minded, at that)...here's a strong one on COVID-19:

https://www.joshuakennon.co...

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Markets in crisis are a great opportunity to be a correct contrarian though. Up 300% for the last two weeks.

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Could it just be that cases where contrarians can be proven right quickly overlap heavily with cases that are high stakes and require immediate action, which means debate has to be fast and fierce? Then, any options outside the Overton Window are going to be far too difficult to build consensus around, while they could distract from building consensus around an option from inside the Overton Window.

i.e., What if conformists aren't necessarily trying to avoid being proven wrong, they're just trying to build consensus around one option as fast as possible, and permitting options from outside the Overton Window slows them down?

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Could you elaborate on how this connects to the current situation vis-a-vis coronavirus?

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