

Lonely Dissent - blackswan
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/lonely-dissent.html

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prospero
Non-conformity is only relative to the social and intellectual norms in your
life. A sci-fi convention is essentially a huge collection of socially tone-
deaf individuals, so of course they're going to be tolerant; there's no
coherent metric for conformity in the first place. This is probably why
intellectual movements form: they create a context in which new and
unconventional ideas lack the stigma they would have elsewhere.

This means that you can't measure the level of a person's non-conformity by
some objective metric of how "strange" they are. A person who is well
integrated into their social or intellectual milieu can do something less eye-
catching than wearing a clown suit and still be much greater non-conformist.
It depends entirely on your environment, your audience, and how well you
understand both.

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mkn
I think that the point about risking the incomprehension of those around you
points to something deeper. I always marvel at Goddard's courage, for example,
when he was launching liquid rockets out of a cabbage patch. Here's a guy who
_moved back in with his mom_ and faced the ridicule of local and national
newspapermen who fundamentally misunderstood the physics of what he was doing.

The incomprehension of the tribe nearly always leads to the most crushing kind
of social defeat. And when you factor in the inevitable failures of any novel
challenge, I'll bet you'll find that the life of an intellectual hero isn't
just lonely, it's leadenly depressing. (I'm thinking right now of a comment
made by one of the Wright brothers on the train home after a failed flight
attempt: "Man will not fly for a thousand years.") It's no fun to be a
depressed hero, I'm sure. For every Goddard and Wright brother, there must be
thousands of failure stories, each of them detailing a life you'd never want
to live.

The cost associated with real innovation is generally very high. We are, after
all, paleolithic creatures living in a technical world. Conformity means a
successful hunt. We're monkeys with mp3 players. Thus, this innovator's
penalty is an atavism, but it's not one we're going to overcome anytime soon.

~~~
Eliezer
_I'm thinking right now of a comment made by one of the Wright brothers on the
train home after a failed flight attempt: "Man will not fly for a thousand
years."_

And yet... they kept trying.

It's not always the right idiom for ordinary problems - but for impossible
ones, sure.

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wmeredith
Did anyone not already know this? Anyone over the age of about 21 knows how
much easier it is to add to momentum than to create it. It's the difference
between a stand-up comic and a funny guy at a party. Or a founder and an
employee. One is creating something, the other is redirecting it.

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hugh
Not a bad article, but most of the examples given of "lonely dissent" seem to
me to fall much more into the "vegetarian" category than the "clown suit"
category.

For me at least, the feeling upon encountering somebody who tells me that he
wants to have his body frozen after he dies isn't "Oh wow, what a crazy idea
I've never heard before", it's "Oh, another one of those". Cryonicists (if
that's a word) are too numerous and too well connected to each other to really
count as lonely dissenters.

Oh, and I could have done without the "PS. I am awesome" bit at the end.

~~~
Retric
_It's not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way._

I think his point was showing up in a clown suit is not a "correct" choice
because it's non conformist. Their are times a places where dissent is correct
and others where going with the pack is correct and you can't arbitrarily say
one is better than the other in all cases.

