The Cloud of Negativity

Why everyone hates contrarians

Here is a piece of advice that I can’t stress enough: If you feel the need to correct someone, take a contrarian position to something someone says, or suggest an improvement, and you haven’t been invited to do any of those things, shut your fucking mouth.

Seriously, everyone hates it when you do that. Literally no one likes it. The only reason people don’t say anything to your face is because they have no desire to listen to your self-justifications for your incessant negativity.

It’s even worse when the contrarian has to resort to being pedantic just to find something negative to say. That’s not only pointlessly negative, it’s retarded.

I despise contrarians, and I say this despite being one of the world’s most significant contrarians at the present moment, having taken a strongly contrarian position to the the two scientific fields of population genetics and evolutionary biology. But pointing out errors that have been propagated for decades and centuries is very different than raining on everyone’s parades every chance you get.

Shut. Your. Fucking. Mouth.

Again, I can’t stress that enough. Turn some of that energy you customarily put into your pedantry into finding something positive to say, even if it is something as banal and prosaic as “hey, congratulations, good for you!” Don’t start every response to something someone else says with the words “no” or “well” or “yeah, but…” It doesn’t make you look smart. It makes you tedious.

Here’s the thing. No one pays any attention to anything you say because your negativity is totally predictable. I instinctively and automatically discount anything that a contrarian says because I know everything they say is about their desire to be contrarian, that there isn’t any meaningful information in it.

In fact, it can be amusing, if perhaps a little cruel, to use their instincts to make them look retarded to everyone else; I once steered a contrarian into publicly declaring that it isn’t dark at midnight.

So again, I remind you, for your own benefit and for the benefit of everyone in your social circles, that if you are a contrarian who is prone to feeling the compulsion to be contrary for its own sake, whenever you feel that compulsion, keep your fucking mouth shut.

Because absolutely no one wants to hear it. Ever.