Resident Contrarian
Article
Resident Contrarian is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 02, 2022 and November 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “God-Emperor Of Dune , reviewed by Resident Contrarian. RC is a rapidly aging father from Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs at residentcontrarian.com”; “Last year Resident Contrarian wrote a widely-read post on his experience being poor”; “Comments of the week: Resident Contrarian corrects/clarifies”. It most often appears alongside AWanderingMind, Francis Galton, Wikipedia.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: September 02, 2022
- Last seen: November 11, 2022
Appears In
- Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
- Links For September 2022
- Open Thread 244
- Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
Related Pages
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- AWanderingMind (2 shared issues)
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- Francis Galton (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- 1587 (1 shared issues)
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- 1587, A Year Of No Significance (1 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- @campeters4 (1 shared issues)
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- @itsahousingtrap (1 shared issues)
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- a_reader (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
God-Emperor Of Dune, reviewed by Resident Contrarian. RC is a rapidly aging father from Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs at residentcontrarian.com and is available for freelance work
I was happy with my decision to keep this contest anonymous, because the most “famous” person to enter won first place, and if it had been open-identity I would have wondered whether he was drawing on a pre-existing fan base. But no, Erik can rest assured he is actually very good at writing (which he probably already knew, being a novelist and all, but you never know). In fact, 2 of the 5 winners, plus an extra 1.5 of the remaining finalists, were authors of Substacks which I read and have linked to here (Hoel, Roger’s Bacon, Resident Contrarian, and the extra 0.5 is for Etienne who I didn’t know about before this week but just saw his post Common Tech Jobs Described As Cabals Of Mesoamerican Wizards on the subreddit). I’m always suspicious that everything is fake and good writers aren’t actually good and it’s just a social conspiracy to believe that they are, but these results are a vote in support of our existing writer-identification-institutions (are they all Substack? I guess it’s just Substack) - although many unknown people also did very well, including the 2nd place winner (I didn’t get a response to my email asking how I should reveal his identity, so I’m defaulting to initials, but I don’t recognize his real name either).
9: Last year Resident Contrarian wrote a widely-read post on his experience being poor. This helped him start a writing career, a few other things went well for him, and now he’s written a followup about his experience not being poor anymore, with a focus on whether/when/how consumption grows to fill the space available (eg people making $500K a year who still feel like they’re forced to live paycheck to paycheck).
Inline links: his experience being poor, his experience not being poor anymore
4: Comments of the week: Resident Contrarian corrects/clarifies the way some Christians use the term “inspired”, and Shaked on “stair vs. elevator” predictions.
Inline links: corrects/clarifies, “stair vs. elevator” predictions
I. Contra Resident Contrarian . . .
Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States, where he defends his skepticism of jhana and other widely-claimed hard-to-falsify internal states. It’s long, but I’ll quote a part that seemed especially important to me:
Inline links: On Unfalsifiable Internal States
The evidence for jhanas is thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it, a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot saying it worked for them, a handful of experiments with EEGs that seem to show positive results, and a promise that if I tried hard enough I could replicate the results. The evidence for Resident Contrarian being especially good at detecting lies is he says so.