
The Four Quadrants of Conformism - razin
http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html
======
stopachka
Loved this essay. The phrase “aggressively conventional minded” is genius, and
may contribute a lot towards the solution.

As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring
more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak
America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing
the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right
militarizing).

Yet, as PG points out, the independent minded are good at figuring out
solutions. No matter what, the fundamental ideas that America is built on is
focused so heavily on freedom that I trust the aggressively independent to
protect, and the passively independent minded to innovate.

~~~
missosoup
Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm
legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really
hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know
history are destined to repeat it, I guess.

Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as
'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on
political alignment, which is a very powerful weapon to shut down discourse.

This rising culture is freedom and diversity in all things except thought.
This is how totalitarian regimes form. This is what my parents dumped their
entire life savings into escaping, and here I am watching it rise again.

~~~
oisdk
I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle
ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on
twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police
in the US.

Like there is an authoritarian government _right there_ for you to criticise,
but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make
rice, or is it cultural appropriation? A thread (1/329)".

~~~
vorpalhex
You're engaging in a straw man of both sides and it makes me want to disregard
your argument entirely.

> you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like...

Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the
professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign?
There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he
was on the legal defense team for someone despicable.

As a society, we've decided that yes, even criminals need lawyers. To cancel
someone and permanently affect their career for engaging in the most liberal
of virtues and defending even criminals ( _especially_ if you believe we live
in an authoritarian state) is beyond the pale.

> when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the
> US.

I've been working for police reform in what I believe is a flawed system for
years. Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade.
Every protestor killed by a fellow protestor (17 is the current count), every
major spike in crime due to police being defunded instead of retrained, and
every cop sent to the hospital because of folks throwing glass bottles and
chunks of brick is not going to magically dry up and go away the next time we
want to raise a serious issue.

We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm change and it
works much better than arson.

~~~
oisdk
> Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the
> professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign?
> There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because
> he was on the legal defense team for someone despicable.

So the only actual example I was able to google here was the last one: and I
have to say, is that it? A guy wasn’t asked back as a dorm administrator once
he joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team? That’s the “cancel culture” you’re
talking about, in contrast to one of the most brutal and grotesque onslaught
of police brutality in the west in recent memory?

Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a _murder_ , right?

This is what I mean when I say it’s ridiculous. The Harvard guy didn’t even
lose his job, for goodness’ sake.

> Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade.

Where did I defend or endorse the actions of protestors? My point is simply
that it’s ridiculous to think the main authoritarian crisis in the US right
now is “cancel culture” when it is literally in the midst of a brutal police
crackdown against protestors.

Also I’m sorry but it’s hard to take you seriously with regards to police
violence when you didn’t mention a single thing the police did wrong in your
list of grievances, but you’re happy to talk about the protestors.

> every major spike in crime due to police being defunded instead of retrained

This is not a view supported by the evidence.

> We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm change and it
> works much better than arson.

The US has more prisoners per capita than any society at any point in history
in the world. The police are armed and violent. And those systems which
apparently work so well have been in place throughout all this. But maybe you
should tell me more about how these systems work so well.

Also I’m continually amazed that Americans forget their proud history of
violent protest so quickly. It always seems like protest against injustice was
fine in some unspecified “past” but of course all of that Is behind us now and
The best we can do is vote (vote for the party at least partly responsible for
the state of the police today, by the way).

~~~
im3w1l
> Like you realise the protests were sparked off by a murder, right?

It wasn't a murder. I suggest you read the transcript from Lane's body camera.
Key points:

* Lane approaches George Floyd asks him to show his hands. Floyd is so high, he has difficulty complying.

* They take him out of his car and try to get him in the police car.

* Floyd claims he can't breathe and begs to be allowed to lie on the ground.

* They call the ambulance (unclear if this is before after he is put on the ground).

* He keeps talking for a few minutes, before losing consciousness.

[https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-
camera...](https://www.fox9.com/news/transcript-of-officers-body-camera-shows-
george-floyd-told-officers-i-cant-breathe-before-being-restrained)

~~~
RonaldRaygun
Wow, that was so nice of the police to let him lie down when he asked.

Then to thoughtfully apply a knee to his neck to prevent him from flying up
into the sky if gravitational attraction were to suddenly reverse, so very
helpful and just! And they kept at it for almost 9 minutes, such dedication to
helping the public, wow.

------
sinker
There's a subtype he doesn't mention but I think deserves notice and is
especially pertinent to today's environment. That is, the conventionally-
minded who is convinced they are die-hard independently-minded.

People like this come across by chance doctrine which appeal to a special part
of themself, be it religious, political, or social doctrine. They hardily
embrace the newfound doctrine and denounce others as having fundamentally the
wrong framework of thinking. They come across like-minded people and make
blanket statements against their detractors and constantly reformulate the
perception of their ideology to be in the right.

In one sense, they believe themselves to be highly individualistic because
they go against what they perceive to be the overall grain of society. This
lends them conviction.

But in reality, their beliefs are not actually contrarian or minority beliefs,
and these people would never had nurtured these beliefs or had the courage to
actually publicly express them without the implicit support of some large
chunk of society.

I believe this to be the reality today. So many people are deluded in thinking
they are the small, under-represented, minority, oppressed group when they
actually function as the oppressors to people who are sincerely independently-
minded.

And when one who is independently-minded sees another who is deluded they are
independently-minded, but in reality is aggressively-conventional, we cannot
help but notice the hypocrisy.

~~~
bendbro
I think your argument makes sense. It fits well with my experiences with
"MAGAers" and "SJWs". I also think this style of politics is here to stay, as
it is the dominate strategy. America has a fracturing hegemony: there is no
longer a single universally shared set of basic beliefs. Because we no longer
share the same basic beliefs, disagreements are now less likely to be due to
logical validity and more likely due to unshared premises. This means the way
of politics I think we'd all prefer, of arguing logically from shared core
beliefs, will be less useful, making the alternative, arguing emotionally
about premises, more effective. I think people "come[ing] across by chance
doctrine which appeal to a special part of themself, be it religious,
political, or social doctrine" is this effect in action.

Though, some criticisms of what you said:

1\. It can depend on surroundings. A leftoid will rightly feel like an
independent mind in a conservative area and a rightoid will rightly feel like
an independent mind in a liberal area.

2\. Your logic can misidentify skeptics as traditionalists. It is easy to
misconstrue a progressively minded skeptic as a conservative because they
criticize most currently popular progressive issues.

On a personal note: as a progressively minded skeptic, in my experiences with
society, coworkers, friends, significant others, and family, I feel I have
increasingly been lumped in as a "deplorable conservative." I have felt this
cultural shift coming for many years now, when "SJWs" (I know this hits a sour
note with many liberals, but I don't know how else to succinctly categorize
these people) first started cropping up in the spaces I frequented:

0\. The removal of Christmas celebration from my elementary school

1\. Atheism+

2\. My school's official hackathon group (was taken over by left leaning
people who said you cannot form teams based on peoples' programming ability)

3\. My school's official programming FB group banning "spicy" posts (an
example being one where people were arguing failing fizzbuzz is an acceptable
way to decide someone is not a programmer)

4\. My school via the coed programming fraternity- it was a place full of
people involved in 2 and 3

5\. The wider programming community (donglegate, stallman's cancellation,
linus and sarah sharp controversy, github and meritocracy, redis CoC
controversy, etc)

6\. Gamergate (specifically attempts to politically pressure games to alter
their stories and design to suit audiences that aren't the typical customer).

7\. Politics that are safely expressable at work without having a meet 'n
greet with HR. Very, very far left ideas are routinely plastered at work, and
political "courageous conversations" meetings expect exclusively uncourageous
mainstream ideas.

8\. Politics that are safely expressable with acquaintances, friends, and
family without risk of being excommunicated.

9\. For brevity, I exclude many others.

Thankfully, the latest batch of ideas (abolish police, abolish suburbs,
abolish capital gains) have such a large impact that it has finally given me a
hill worth dying on, and I feel free to non-anonymously express, with all the
snark of a twitter checkmark, that these ideas blow ass. If that skepticism
makes me an oppressor, then I embrace being one. I suppose I do deserve some
credit for not being silent, since that would be violence.

~~~
grandmczeb
> Thankfully, the latest batch of ideas (abolish police, abolish suburbs,
> abolish capital gains) have such a large impact that it has finally given me
> a hill worth dying on

Who's seriously calling to "abolish suburbs"? It's easy to stand up against
ideas no one is advocating for - that's called a straw man.

~~~
anonymoushn
YIMBYs I guess. People who want to be able to live near work without paying
millions for the privelege, people who want to be able to use public transit,
people who don't like subsidizing others' desire to drive and park everywhere,
people who think coffee shops should be allowed to be built within walking
distance of their homes.

~~~
grandmczeb
This is called “ending subsidies for suburbs” or “ensuring affordable access
to housing” or “promoting livable neighborhoods” or even “removing onerous
regulations preventing development in our nations most productive urban
areas”. That’s very different than “abolish the suburbs”, which makes it sound
like you’re going to _ban_ single family homes.

~~~
bendbro
It doesn't ban single family homes, but it would ban communities composed
exclusively of single family homes. Whether it is called "abolish suburbs" or
"promoting livable neighborhoods," once the veil is pierced, it will be
interpreted the same. You are right though that "abolish the suburbs" is more
rhetorical than fact.

~~~
grandmczeb
I mean, no one is advocating eliminating single family zoning nationally
either. Your characterization of Biden’s plan is totally wrong.

~~~
bendbro
Why is it wrong? I am reading from his own platform.

Biden's plan specifically calls for ending state and local policies that allow
"exclusionary zoning" and cites the "Home Act." Looking into the Home Act,
"exclusionary zoning" refers to "single-family zoning" as "exclusionary
zoning."

1\. Biden plan citing Home Act:
[https://joebiden.com/housing/](https://joebiden.com/housing/)

2\. The home act impact on single family "exclusionary zoning":
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/social-
justice/c...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/psmag.com/.amp/social-justice/can-
cory-booker-elizabeth-warren-and-u-s-cities-end-exclusionary-zoning)

~~~
grandmczeb
That's not what it says. Here's the actual text:

> As President, Biden will enact legislation requiring any state receiving
> federal dollars through the Community Development Block Grants or Surface
> Transportation Block Grants to _develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning,
> as proposed in the HOME Act of 2019_ by Majority Whip Clyburn and Senator
> Cory Booker. Biden will also invest $300 million in Local Housing Policy
> Grants to _give states and localities the technical assistance and planning
> support they need to eliminate exclusionary zoning policies_ and other local
> regulations that contribute to sprawl.

Neither of those eliminate single family zoning for locations that want to
keep them.

Here's the actual text of the HOMES act: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-
congress/house-bill/4808...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-
congress/house-bill/4808/text)

It requires communities that receive certain subsidies (community development
block grants and surface transportation block grants) to make a plan to
address inclusionary zoning. That's also not ending single family zoning; if
you want to keep your existing zoning you can, you just can't get subsidized
by the federal government to do it.

Also it doesn't even come close to "abolish suburbs". Curious if you still
think that was an accurate characterization?

~~~
bendbro
I'll stand by it, but I admit my argument is weaker than needed to match the
rhetoric.

I don't think the proposal directly bans suburbs, but I think it may
transitively. I wouldn't expect there to be a single state that doesn't
receive federal dollars for community development. And if the state receives
any dollars at all, per this proposal they are required to move towards bans
on "exclusionary zoning" aka "single family zoning." So if a state wants to
ensure federal funds for communities and allow for single family zoned
suburbs, there seems to be a conflict. Because I believe every state would be
interested in doing both (subsidizing poorer communities and permitting
suburban communities), it worries me greatly that this bill will effectively
ban suburbs.

I would absolutely remove my characterization of this bill as abolishing
suburbs if the bill only applied to states that use federal funds to subsidize
the creation of suburbs. I would still have a problem with it, but it would be
very minor.

~~~
dragonwriter
> And if the state receives any dollars at all, per this proposal they are
> required to move towards bans on "exclusionary zoning"

No, they aren't required to “move toward bans” on anything. They are to move
toward inclusive land use by some combination of zoning policy and other
regulation. And it's only CDBG recipients that have to do this, which are
often _local_ governments. Rich suburbs probably aren't competing for CDBG
grants in the first place, and wouldn't have to do anything.

The specific examples in the act of policies which can meet the requirement,
and many of the examples are consistent with single-family zoning.

~~~
bendbro
That is comforting. I will research this.

[Edit] the specific line from Biden's plan that included "states" which gave
me the initial idea this policy applies to states rather than individual
communities. "Biden will enact legislation requiring any state receiving
federal dollars through the Community Development Block Grants or Surface
Transportation Block Grants to develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning"

I will continue researching nonetheless. It may just be misleading copy.

------
GCA10
Lots of great ideas here -- but in keeping with all top-vintage Paul Graham
essays, he takes his best points to about 130% of their validity.

So I'd like to weigh in on this assertion: "To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone
else is wrong."

Not so. To be a successful scientist, you need to be orderly, fast and well-
connected in finding all the rest of the Next Rights, once a few of your peers
(or you) have opened up a whole new river of truth by finding the first right.
(See James Watson, Ernest Lawrence, etc.)

You can see this in the evolution of practically every exciting field, whether
it's subatomic physics, molecular biology, paleontology, etc.

This dynamic requires a fifth state in Graham's admirably simple 2x2 grid. We
need to recognize people that can be defiant non-conformists when the moment
presents itself -- and then work within the system to make the most of their
second and third-order insights as the world embraces their big idea.

The concept of the brilliant, isolated, irritable genius is a mainstay of a
certain kind of movie or novel. But in real life, the most effective
disrupters are just as good at forming large teams that lead the charge toward
the next right (once they've found their breakthrough idea) as in coming up
with that breathtakingly strange new idea in the first place.

~~~
vikramkr
I'm unsure about your example of James Watson as a successful scientist. He
was successful, yes, and was a scientist. But I don't think he was successful
as a scientist. Rosalind Franklin made the key scientific insights crucial to
figuring out DNA's structure. She wasn't even actually the person that took
Photo 51, that was her student. She was, however, the one who presented her
insights that the phosphate backbone is on the outside of the molecule, one of
the most crucial insights to figuring out how DNA works since prior to that
watson crick et al thought the backbone was on the inside. That goes beyond
just "contributing" the photo, that's actually generating the scientific
insights that unlocked the structure of the molecule before being derided as
an assistant incapable of understanding her own data by watson and then dying
without a nobel. In light of that, I don't see how watson can get credit as a
successful scientist. Crick went on to make other contributions such as
codifying the central dogma, watson not so much.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _Since one 's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of
> the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown
> up in a quite different society_

This contains a strong assumption of nature over nurture. I push back on that.
(A point of evidence being salivary cortisol correlations with high-stress
childhoods and even prenatal environments.)

Independent-minded cultures produce more independent thinkers. A culture that
censors raises children by rewarding convention-seeking behaviour and sharply
punishing non-conformance.

(Counterpoint: Did the children of circa 1920s academics become academics at a
greater frequency than those of postwar academics? Anecdotally, I think so. A
lot of them, as PG hypothesises, became founders. That suggests an innate
quality that seeks its environment.)

This might also be content-dependent. When I was young, I oscillated between
tattletelling and rampant rulebreaking, with a memorable drive to stand out
from my peer group. Notably, an inflection point, to my memory and,
surprisingly, to my discovery a few years ago after reading childhood notes,
was when my family immigrated to America. To-day, I’m passively conformist
with the law, but moderately independent when it comes to personal social,
political and broader commercial activities, enjoying standing out even if it
means being quirky or disliked. I don’t imagine I’d have been the same in
Switzerland or in India.

~~~
novok
After seeing how different an adopted child acted compared to the non adopted
ones in a close family member's family, I believe a lot more in nature causing
big differences in behavior vs. nurture. Even when you have your own kids,
children born 1 or 2 years apart in the same family can have very different
personalities.

People don't like it, because it's used to justify fatalistic write offs of
people. I agree it's wrong to do that because people are often wrong in
writing off people, especially the aggressively independent :)

~~~
arrosenberg
Adopted and second children still represent different environments. If the
adopted child wasn't adopted at birth, their formative years would greatly
impact what is perceived as nature. Its a meme that parents are generally more
cavalier and relaxed with later children than they are with the first, and
that is a significant environmental variable.

Nature definitely hardwires in some baseline chemistry, but those first couple
of years have a huge impact on how a child will deal with that chemistry.

~~~
sinker
Yes nurture has an effect, but the current science suggests that our DNA has
an even greater determination of who we are than we ever imagined, the degree
of which is incredibly surprising and non-intuitive. It would suggest that we
become who we are determined to be, no matter the early childhood variables.

[https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saW...](https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93YWtpbmd1cC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw&ep=14&episode=N2VmOTU5M2YtNTczYS00ZGQxLWJkMjUtYzgzNjJhYjA5NDQx)

------
himinlomax
Very interesting take. This reminds me of Bob Altemeyer's work. He summed up
his decades of research on authoritarianism in a free ebook at
[https://www.theauthoritarians.org/](https://www.theauthoritarians.org/) .

I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important work of
political science / social psychology I've ever read.

Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social dominant" map to
Graham's "passively conventional" and "aggressively conventional." The latter
also tends to correspond to what psychiatrists would describe as narcissist,
anti-social and possibly psychopathic traits.

For example, he conducted experiments as role playing games, like a model
United Nations. When he removed the few "social dominants" from the player
pool, the game ran smoothly, there was peace and everyone went to Alpha
Centauri or something.

But when he _added_ a few social dominants, things went to hell quick, and
nuclear war broke out. Note that social dominants / narcissists are typically
at most a few percents of the population.

I'm sure many people have noticed the phenomenon in any organisation: when a
narcissist gets a modicum of power, they can destroy an organisation from
within.

~~~
soundnote
Altemeyer should be viewed with some suspicion: He thinks left-wing
authoritarianism is a "Loch Ness monster", and in talks with David Friedman
couldn't comprehend why eg. labor unions could constitute an authority to a
person - he viewed union membership purely in transactional terms with little
ideological content.

His scale may identify a certain kind of authoritarian, but his work is almost
assuredly blind as a bat to others and not a comprehensive take.

~~~
himinlomax
This is textbook ad hominem. His work stands regardless of ideology.

But you're also wrong on two counts:

First, he wrote this and did most of his work at a time when power structures
were clearly right wing. But the mechanisms he describes are universal and
independent of the labels used by those in power: authoritarians will strongly
conform to the dominant ideology, and social dominants will pretend to adhere
to it to gain power. He just used the labels reflecting the situation at the
time.

Second, he specifically points out that authoritarians in the Soviet Unions
were nominally left wing.

Consider that this kind of shift in dominant ideology is a slow process, on a
period longer that one academic's career.

------
sideshowb
> On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within
> universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-
> minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago
> have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You
> have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those.

In defence of my chosen place in a university: being a quant or CEO implies a
different kind of confirmity, namely, to the strong requirement of generating
revenue (or at least investment) in the short term. Though we're all pushed to
get academic funding as well, I don't think we have it as bad as either of
those two roles, and that itself allows a certain diversity of thought.

~~~
kaymanb
I would also argue that the intersection of people who become quants / found
successful startups and did so despite having a real shot at becoming a
professor is pretty small.

My only real data points are my own graduate school experience, but I haven't
heard of anyone who was on a path to success in academia who didn't continue
on down that path, or at least give it their absolute best shot before moving
in. By success I mean maybe a post-doc or two followed by a reasonable shot at
a tenure-track position at a decent school. This restriction is made in the
same way that (I am assuming) pg is only referring to quants at decent firms,
and startup founders who at least have an idea they can get off the ground. I
seriously doubt that any kind of conformism at say, an ivy league institution,
is because people who would have become profs there chose not to.

~~~
zornthewise
No comment about the broader picture but there have been very smart people who
have quit academia and gone into industry for whatever reason. Maybe the most
famous is Jim Simons (he had an exceptional mathematical career before going
into finance) but I know a few more examples.

~~~
waterhouse
And financial companies seem to recruit from high scorers on math contests.
They often sponsor the contests too, and get their names displayed where
possible, such as on free swag given to contestants.

The abilities and skills that win math contests aren't identical with those
that would do well in academic research, but I think there's a good amount of
overlap.

------
coldcode
If you want to learn about the various types of people and how they relate to
the world around them, study the French Revolution (in depth, not just a
snippet). You will find every kind of person (in much more complex
combinations than presented here), and how they
participate/change/destroy/terrorize/etc. People today are no different we
just have more technology.

~~~
stopachka
Any books you’d recommend?

~~~
martythemaniak
Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, season 3. Probably about 30-40hrs of
content (a lot of history happened!) and I find his content is a real good for
first-timers.

------
frasermince
While I think there might be a grain of truth here I really disagree with how
he states it. He seems to be really placing higher value on the isolated
genius who does great things despite society being against him. This seems to
be based on a lot of pretension and dismisses people who do not think like
him.

With how he defines conformity and nonconformity one could argue that the
flatearther surrounded by non flatearthers could be a nonconformist. I would
argue it's not conformity or lack there of that leads to effectiveness, but
instead an indifference to conforming leading to a pursuit of the truth
regardless of if it is mainstream or not. So I would say his quadrant system
does not define the independent minded person he talks about later in the
article.

I think he is in the right ballpark when it comes to pointing to the clear
eyed visionary who is willing to look past the orthodox of those around them.
But I think his formulation of such an idea is reductionistic. People I would
view as conformist have their own worldviews and often pride themselves as
nonconformists. Worldviews are a complicated thing and if we write off the
majority of people as "sheep" or just part of the problem we become part of a
contempt culture that can be really toxic.

~~~
GavinB
Yes, flat-earthers would probably count as non-conformist. I think the point
is that in order to have Galileo, you have to tolerate flat-earthers as well.

I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable, and would add
that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is also not accurate or
productive. They might be making stupid decisions, but they're not stupid
people.

~~~
bittercynic
I disagree, and would count flat-earthers as highly conformist - it's just
that they're conforming to an unconventional view.

------
__alexs
I honestly don't understand this perspective which seems central to a lot of
pgs writing lately: "the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened"

Can anyone explain it?

We are, right now, posting on the most expansive and weakly moderated
communications platform humanity has ever had. You can find almost anyone
opinion imaginable out there with a brief Google search and forums on which to
argue every side of it with.

In what way is free inquiry meaningfully weakened? By any absolute measure it
seems like it can only be the strongest it has ever been.

~~~
neonate
It's because the pendulum has taken a noticeable swing in the reverse
direction, with online mobs getting people fired because of opinions they've
expressed. Extreme labels like "white supremacist" and "Nazi" are being put on
people for views that deviate from approved ideology. This is creating a
climate of fear in which each case of someone getting fired is enough to cow
thousands if not millions of observers, who fear to lose their own jobs if
they speak out or even slip up. Bogus arguments like "it doesn't count unless
the government does it" are being used to dismiss free speech concerns about
this. To me it seems obvious that from a free speech point of view it's fine
for people to respond to each other with criticism, even if they're mean and
mischaracterize each other, but getting people fired crosses an obvious line
into non-speech and physical harm. It's not as harmful as physical violence or
putting someone in prison for what they say, but it's on the same spectrum,
and the psychology of the zealots who want to see people punished in this way
is unmistakeable. That's where the comparisons to the Soviet Union, China, and
so on, come in. Anyone who is familiar with the history knows the type, even
if so far they are unable to do more than exert power over employment.

There's also deplatforming, which falls in between pure speech (such as
criticism/debate) and physical harm (such as firing).

~~~
pvg
'Firing' is not a physical harm unless you mean it literally.

~~~
neonate
It directly impacts livelihood. It's physical in the sense that it's a real
world, tangible harm. This is not at all the same thing as somebody merely
saying something critical on Twitter. There's a clear distinction here.

~~~
pvg
There is a distinction but it's not the one you were originally making. Which
seems important in a discussion about kinds of harms. Firing someone is not
assault.

~~~
neonate
It's exactly the distinction I was making. That's why I said "it's not as
harmful as physical violence" etc. I guess that wasn't enough to be clear.

------
dataisfun
The categorization is interesting albeit deeply _ungrounded_ in any real rigor
and seems of a piece with one of his other recent essays, in which he
developed a psychoanalytic theory of the various kinds of "haters" and
"losers."

Further, I wish Paul Graham would try to convey his ideas with less
condescension and smugness. There's a sense in which he maligns large swaths
of humanity as somehow defective or worthy of shame. Certainly the term
"idiots" doesn't help.

Further there's an essentialism and determinism that's sort of disturbing
(labeling preschoolers as sheep is kind of messed up) and lacking in empathy.

Finally I suppose this is obvious, but I'm guessing Graham situates himself as
a paragon of fierce independent-minded thinking and courage. It's rather
easier to do that when you're absurdly independently wealthy. Thinking through
the courageous stand countless people are taking even right now around the
world, risking life and limb, just makes this feel a bit like a grievance-
laden tempest in a teapot.

------
nappy
Graham framing his essay as such is disingenuous, at best:

    
    
      And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is "Eppur si muove."
    

In case you had to search for this (I did)[0] It's a reference to Galileo
being correct about the Earth orbiting the Sun, and famously so. The
presumption of this reference is that "independent" thinkers _are right_ \-
they are more often wrong. PG seems to presume, or lead the reader to presume,
that these thinkers are more right... oddly the rest of the essay avoids the
question of conventional wisdom being right.

This is also bad writing. The use of set phrases / quotes in a foreign
language without citation is confusing for the reader, and also pedantic.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves)

------
m0llusk
This is all so static. Real life is more dynamic. An aggressive rule enforcer
is an easygoing independent who got mugged and an easygoing independent is an
aggressive rule enforcer who went to college.

Damage done in the world comes more from failing to understand how people get
influenced in their choices than from picking the wrong quadrant.

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Any person's coordinates will change over time, that is true. I don't think
that removes any value from the measurement system.

------
hrktb
As for most attempts to classify people, it should be strongly stated that any
single human would fits several quadrants depending on the subject, the phase
in their life they are in, or even the mood of the day.

I read this two dimensional presentation only as device to discuss a
theoretical point, and not something that could have any practicality.

In particular, I think a lot of people switch from the "sheep" quadrant and
the "naughty ones" pretty freely. They'll want to obey rules until they hit
one that they feel doesnt' make sense and/or needs to be broken, and ideally
will get back to being "Sheep" once it doesn't make sense to be a "naughty
one" anymore (i.e. rules have changed, or better, they changed the rule)

That's also a reason why I see places like startup hubs where people
consciously behave in unconventional ways (= be jerks, most of the time) to
feel like they're "naughty ones" shouldn't be lauded, and being indepdendent
minded should be balanced with benefits to the surrounding people or society
(if you break big rules, it should have a big payoff for everyone)

PS: I find wording it as "sheep" to be unneedingly pejorative towards people
who just don't break the rules and let others live their own life. In other
classifications it would be "lawful neutral" for instance.

~~~
Archit3ch
> In particular, I think a lot of people switch from the "sheep" quadrant and
> the "naughty ones" pretty freely. They'll want to obey rules until they hit
> one that they feel doesnt' make sense and/or needs to be broken, and ideally
> will get back to being "Sheep" once it doesn't make sense to be a "naughty
> one" anymore (i.e. rules have changed, or better, they changed the rule)

Unethical life pro tip: If you are breaking the rules, at least make a case
for why they don't apply to you.

"I'm only stealing to feed my family."

"This isn't an invasion, we're just annexing our own population on the other
side of this border."

~~~
hrktb
True (political pro tip: don't send your army on "vacations" in bordering
countries)

At the extreme, this is the base for civil disobedience: it is a disruptive
breaking of the rules, but in a morally conscious and thought through way.

------
int_19h
I'm on the left myself - far enough that most people I consider like-minded
would scoff at being called "liberal".

And I think that, while our broad cause is both rational and just, there are
way too many people who believe that it can justify things that are
unjustifiable; and who are, in effect, willing to replace their morality with
"revolutionary necessity".

On the subject of conformance, freedom of speech, and censorship, in
particular, this essay by Orwell is getting more relevant day by day:

[https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwel...](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/)

This troubles me a lot, especially as I don't see alternatives here and now -
large-scale, systemic changes are desperately needed, but that requires a mass
movement; and while it's _possible_ to have a mass movement that is not
authoritarian, the one that we _do_ have seems to be infested by authoritarian
thinking to a significant degree.

True, it's fighting against authoritarianism that is even broader in scope -
and worse yet, operating from a veneer of legitimacy, and with resources of
state oppression at its disposal. But if "my" side wins, it'll get that same
veneer - and with the attitudes that I'm observing, I find it hard to believe
that the majority will be willing to discard those powerful tools as a matter
of principle, or even believe that they're truly capable of misusing them.

I don't really have good answers. Insofar as decisions have to be made _today_
, I try to go with what I see as "less wrong" \- but that still leaves a lot
to be desired from an ethical perspective. And yet staying out of the fight is
also an unsatisfactory cop-out; for which I could, perhaps, find convincing
enough excuses for people whose judgment matters to me, but never to my own
conscience.

------
samuelbeniamin
This article is distasteful with tiny number of facts and a lot of opinions.
After all, there is a fact, that he ranked human beings into levels, some
higher than the others, some are trouble makers and others are the angles with
no fault to be found in them, some are "sheep" and others just "naughty". I do
strongly believe that societies are in need for all types of people, some are
conventional and some are unorthodox.

------
timoth3y
For many years, writers of all political persuasions have divided people into
the "independent-thinkers" and the "sheep". Of course, people who think like
they do are the independent-thinkers and the others are the sheep.

This article follows the same very old and tired pattern, and it's a shame,
because I really enjoy most of Paul Graham's essays.

Has anyone ever seen an attempt to define these terms in an objective, data-
driven way? Real data on this might be quite interesting.

~~~
marc_abonce
And of course, there's that relevant xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/610/](https://xkcd.com/610/)

~~~
timoth3y
There is _always_ a relevant XKCD.

------
gregwebs
Since this is claimed to come down to personality types, it would make sense
to look at research on personality types. There is a model of personality
types that seems relate-able where people are characterized as upholder,
rebel, questioner, or obliger [1]. The aggressive ones line up at least:

upholder = tattletales, rebel = naughty ones

I don't think that equating the passive category to personality types in this
model works, but it would be:

questioner = dreamy ones, obliger = sheep

The reason being that obliger is characterized more by relationships with
others (aggressive/passive) than by being conventional or independent minded.

[1] [https://psychcentral.com/blog/4-personality-types-the-
uphold...](https://psychcentral.com/blog/4-personality-types-the-upholder-
questioner-rebel-obliger/)

------
asdfman123
Paul Graham has done it again -- vastly oversimplified things and cast himself
and his peers as intellectually superior/nobler/braver.

~~~
eat_veggies
that's VC as a whole

------
oldsklgdfth
The part of the essay that made me the most introspective was:

" Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

    
    
        I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. "
    

I had to stop and ask myself that question.

~~~
naveen99
It’s a weakly specified / trick question. Do you get to keep your knowledge of
the world as it is today ? if not how are you different than people 200 years
ago ? So you can just ask what your ancestor’s position would have been. Which
we already know the answer to.

~~~
tfehring
It's pretty clear that you don't get to keep your knowledge of the world as it
is today - if you did, the question would collapse to "Do you support
slavery?" which is much less interesting.

Asking what your ancestors believed is also a bit of a miss. My ancestors in
the US were all German-American, and German-Americans overwhelmingly opposed
slavery, so my ancestors probably opposed it, and I probably would have
opposed it too if I had been part of that population, but that's obviously a
total cop-out.

So take the framing of, say you were born into a white slave-owning family in
the antebellum American South. Would you have freed your slaves and joined the
abolitionist movement? The actual people in that situation weren't _entirely_
a monolith - surely at least a few of them actually did that. But if the
actual share who did so was, say, 1% of the population, then you have to think
you're in the top 1% in terms of some combination of empathy, racial
tolerance, forward-thinkingness, etc. to claim that you would. The question is
useful _because_ we're not different than people 200 years ago, no matter how
much we like to think we are.

I think the obvious and more explicit follow-up question is even better though
- "What beliefs do you hold today that will be viewed as negatively 200 years
from now as slavery is today?" If the answer is "none," we must be in such a
utopia to have finally reached the end-state of human moral development.

------
bob33212
I agree that within some groups like humanities departments, twitter and
liberal companies the social justice movement is out of control. Just
promoting a white male employee, or calling the police in a black person you
see commiting a crime would make you fear for your job in some of those
circles.

On the other side there was a member of Congress who called a female member of
Congress a "fucking bitch" and also the president has said plenty of sexist
and racist things recently without either person losing their job.

The fact that both of these can exist in the same country is the troubling
thing to me. They not even remotely trying to understand each other.

~~~
devdas
Calling the cops has turned out to be a death sentence for Black people too
often.

~~~
steveeq1
It's overplayed:
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/WogKi.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WogKi.png)

~~~
bob33212
I don't think your are well informed here. They are protesting the systemic
racism that makes some cops feel like they can get away with leaving their
knee on a black man's neck for 8 minutes killing him.

Maybe you don't think that systemic racism is a major problem or maybe you
think that people should focus on other issues instead? But your graph is
incorrect.

~~~
steveeq1
I feel that the "systemic racist" is overplayed, yes. And the graph is
sourced.

~~~
bob33212
Neither of those sources prove that BLM is only about white on black murder.
Check out this source if you are interested in learning about the goals of BLM
[https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/](https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/)

~~~
defnotashton2
But it's nuanced and more than can be defined on a page with vast sub cultures
and groups all lobbying for power.

As is any social movement, I think there are some problems inherent with it,
like the inability to criticize aspects of the movement without being
considered a racist.

------
elil17
In this article, PG creates a personality test of sorts that, I think, seems
intuitively true. Then, absent any real evidence, he assigns political roles
and moral value to each of the categories he invented.

It’s so farcical to suggest that independent mindedness always manifests as
“intellectual freedom” and conformism manifests as “political correctness.”
(He doesn’t use that phrase but that’s clearly what he’s trying to get at.)

We live in a world where people with power over others (even people with
pretty small amounts of power like professors) have historically been allowed
shielded from the consequences of espousing hate. It is not “conformist” to
advocate that people should be held accountable for what they say.

What PG has done is come up with a “good” category and a “bad” category. He
then says that the people who agree with him are the good people and the
people who don’t are the bad ones. He does so without considering that his
support of Silicon Valley tycoons and professors who are upset that their
students criticized them could actually put him in the conformist category.

~~~
bitcurious
> We live in a world where people with power over others (even people with
> pretty small amounts of power like professors) have historically been
> allowed shielded from the consequences of espousing hate. It is not
> “conformist” to advocate that people should be held accountable for what
> they say.

The conformity is in the process which defines what “hate” is.

~~~
elil17
I don’t understand - what is the process that decides what hate is? How is it
conformist?

------
tmaly
> When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it's in the
> service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible
> greater good each time

I think its hard to imagine people on the other side of your positions and
world view. If your team is winning, you do not stop to think of those on the
opposite side of the coin. But circumstances change, you could be on that
opposite side of the coin someday.

> Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that
> gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity
> department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of
> getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the
> bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.

Free expression of ideas or something else filtered by those that own the
platforms. Is that the choice we have?

------
raverbashing
At the notes, there is something that caught my attention:

> Many professors are independent-minded — especially in math, the hard
> sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed.

And I disagree with it. You don't have to be independent-minded (from the
group) to be "average" successful. Quite the opposite.

Follow the lead, follow the procedures, always take the skeptical side and
you'll just coast through it. A lot of people succeed doing exactly that.

Research? Take the latest papers in an area, try a similar research (nothing
too out of the consensus) and write a grant request for it.

The hard nonconformists, those will have a hard time. And the sad part is that
most of them won't be nonconformists "for good reasons" but rather they will
be most likely quacks. And I say the percentage is high exactly because
academia does not favor anything out of the beaten path and independent
thought is shunned.

~~~
croissants
> You don't have to be independent-minded (from the group) to be "average"
> successful. Quite the opposite.

If this is true, then what exactly separates successful faculty from
unsuccessful faculty? There are lots of graduate students who want to be
faculty, but only a small percentage do. What do you think the distinguishing
factor is if not some kind of new ideas?

~~~
raverbashing
Conformist or not, resiliency and building relationships still play a part.

Given faculty positions are (very) limited, it seems resiliency might be the
most important factor.

------
henning
The idea that you can be independently minded as a quant or at a startup is
absurd.

If you don't parrot the same bullshit as everyone else as a startup employee,
you get fired without feedback because you aren't a "good culture fit." You
have two choices: conform, or work somewhere else.

~~~
ericsoderstrom
His point is that the founders and underlying ideas for startups and
quantitative trading companies need to be unconventional in order to succeed.
Otherwise the returns will already have been captured by the market (in the
case of trading) or the product will already have been built (in the case of a
startup)

------
maCDzP
>I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded
people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the
world

I agree with this statement. But I would also agree with the opposite:
Aggressively independent-minded are also responsible for a disproportionate
amount of the trouble in the world.

Maybe, they are even more disproportionaterly responsible since they are a
really small group?

My 5 cents.

------
jgrahamc
The first part of this essay reminded me of the D&D alignment system:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_\(Dungeons_%26_Dragons\))

------
andybak
As always in discussions of "types of people" it's more nuanced than this.

Someone can be both aggressively conformist over some issues (and towards some
groups) and aggressively independent over others.

In fact if you picture a stereotypical conspiracy-minded alt-right individual
then the exhibit both behaviours at the same time about the same group.
(individualist) "I won't do x because the government tells me I should" and
(conformist) "How dare those liberals in my town break the social conventions
I feel strongly about!"

It's not hard to come up with an equivalent caricature for the left.

Every time you read a way of dividing the world into types - think of an
example of someone who is multiple types. It's very easy in nearly all cases.

~~~
leereeves
I don't see a contradiction in your example. I think such individuals are
consistently being aggressively conformist _with their group_ , but for the
hyper-political, their group isn't the nation, but the party.

That seems to fit with PG's claim that "The call of the aggressively
conventional-minded is 'Crush <outgroup>!'". Naturally that would extend to
disobeying the rules of the outgroup, perhaps solely _because_ the outgroup
proposed them.

~~~
notsureaboutpg
Isnt PG claiming that the "rules" are to value free expression and not turn
people into heretics and that those who "break" this rule are bad and unworthy
and never able to have new, original ideas and thus should never be listened
to?

Sounds like he is trying to say "Crush <outgroup>!" to me...

~~~
dougabug
Of course he is. Crush the tattletales!

Children think in terms like “tattletales” and “naughty.”

------
zimpenfish
With the trajectory of this and the previous one, it honestly feels like we're
only a handful of steps from praising the Intellectual Dark Web(tm) and saying
that Charles Murray was misunderstood.

~~~
jmeister
Outside the far-left, nobody thinks the IDW or Charles Murray are devils.

------
phkahler
I feel like PG has neglected the literature with this one. The two axis are
probably aligned with exisiting traits from the field of psychology
(agreeableness seems relevant for starters). It's nice that he considered all
this, but I think he did so in his own bubble.

There can be benefits from reinventing things in your own way, but to
completely overlook the existing work can be a mistake too. There is so much
more out there on this stuff than analogies from junior high.

~~~
sanxiyn
Conventional/independent mind axis is literally Openness of Big Five model.
People really should study Big Five. I agree PG is reinventing the wheel.

------
mkloop
Excellent essay. I've been asking similar questions myself in the past couple
of months, but in terms of European history.

If I see a conformist activist, the first thing I ask myself: In a real
crisis, would this person be the next Oskar Schindler?

The answer is almost always "no".

If I see an aggressive activist, the question is: Would this person still be
aggressive during an actual crisis.

In some cases, the answer is "yes". But in the majority of cases I doubt it
and think they would just switch sides.

~~~
newacct583
Have you been watching what's happening in Portland? Where on the spectrum do
you put those folks?

------
kristianc
> For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-
> minded, but aggressively so.

Luckily there’s an easy way to verify this - how many of the current YC cohort
are B2B SaaS startups?

Today’s collection of startup CEOs are the very opposite of aggressively
independent minded - they’re people who 15 years ago would have done an MBA or
gone into finance.

------
davnicwil
In one of his previous essays (can't find the specific one, but it talks about
Cambridge) pg talks about how he thinks in the future startups might come more
and more directly out of university towns because people with ideas already
tend to congregate there, and mostly get drawn to hubs like Silicon Valley
because of funding. As it gets cheaper to start a startup and need for funding
decreases, this might not be so necessary any more.

Towards the end of this essay he talks about the possibility that people with
ideas might start to congregate around other institutions than universities in
the future. He does explicitly say that he can't predict how this will play
out, but it would be really interesting to read his thoughts on what he thinks
those institutions could look like, or just what features they might have in
broad terms.

pg, if you're reading this, that would be a great future essay I'd love to
read!

------
TigeriusKirk
Does a voting and flagging system on a discussion board reward the
aggressively conventional or the aggressively independent to a greater extent?

Which group does such a system punish to a greater extent?

~~~
chippy
In HN people often flag submissions to keep the identity and content more
coherent and to reduce flame. (e.g. flagging advertisements, political and
culture war submissions)

Perhaps it's the passive ones that flag submissions, but downvoting comments
occurs by more aggressive conventional ones? I'd love to see statistics.

------
montebicyclelo
> ...the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began in the mid
> 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has recently flared up
> again with the arrival of social media.

> the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities..

Are there some examples of what this might refer to?

~~~
f0ff
Take Peterson for example.

~~~
DavidVoid
People are intolerant of Peterson because of Peterson's intolerance though.

~~~
motorcycleman9
Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position
is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a
psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients'
lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative
lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path
is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.

~~~
DavidVoid
One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the opposition to bill C-16.
A bill he claimed to oppose because of its free-speech implications, when all
the bill actually did was extend _existing_ legal protections of identifiable
groups to also include gender identity and gender expression. Those exact same
protections already existed on the basis of race, religion, national or ethnic
origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, and mental or physical disability. If
Peterson's gripe is with compelled speech then how come he didn't strongly
criticize the existing legislation for other identifiable groups, but instead
just singled out the new protections for transgender individuals?

> straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to
> personal risk of worse outcomes.

Which is a baseless and _very_ questionable claim to make.

> Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant.

Peterson is a Christian conservative with some fairly patriarchal ideas [1,2],
so I think characterizing him as intolerant is pretty fair.

[1] "[Western feminists avoid criticizing Islam because of] their unconscious
wish for brutal male domination."
[https://twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi/status/1001164042856271874](https://twitter.com/aliamjadrizvi/status/1001164042856271874)

[2] It is "hypocritical" for a woman to wear makeup in the workplace if she
doesn't want to be sexually harassed.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTglME9rvQ&t=7m12s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blTglME9rvQ&t=7m12s)

~~~
tome
As I understand it (and maybe I'm wrong) his objection was that the law would
compel his speech (in particular to call a transwoman a woman). Is that claim
false? Is there any existing similar compelled speech under the existing
legislation? If not then that seems to explain why he hadn't previously
criticized the legislation.

~~~
joshuamorton
It would compel that speech in the same way that you are compelled to call me
"Joshua" and not "asshole" when we are engaging in a conversation at work.

------
kutorio
Initially I wondered if pg was insinuating that startup hubs could replace
universities as the new haven of independent thinking:

> "People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options
> now. Now they can become quants or start startups."

> "If existing institutions are compromised, they'll create new ones."

However, after reading through the essay a second time, I'm more pessimistic
about the positive conclusion of the essay. If startups succeed by "make stuff
people want", and given there are "far more conventional-minded people than
independent-minded ones", then perhaps independent-minded CEOs making tools
for conventional-minded people is not a rare accident, but rather an
inevitability.

------
julesqs
did paul graham really just imply that himself and his fellow silicon valley
millionaires would have been abolitionists if they were alive during slavery

------
alexashka
Paul Graham continues to re-invent what others have pointed out in more
succinct and clever ways.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-
lazy/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/)

You can almost guess what Paul is going to write about - just see what cliche
is being discussed on Twitter and come up with the laziest thought that an
average programmer will find 'insightful' \- that's Paul Graham's next 'essay'
:)

------
dj_gitmo

      "This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley.
      Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded,
      they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as they could
      only have dreamed of."
    

This comes across as self-aggrandizing and a tad elitist.

    
    
      "On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities 
      is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. 
      People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now
      they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to
      succeed at either of those."
    

This is happening for economic reasons. Jobs outside academia pay more than
they used to, the US no longer have a high income tax rate like we did in the
1950s, and there is more competition for academic jobs. Maybe at one point
deciding to become a quant was independent-minded, but at this point it's a
well worn path. Also, I'm sure there are some ideas that would be off-limits
in quant circles

------
marsrovershadow
A funnier version of the same <more or less> set of ideas is "The Basic Laws
of Human Stupidity" by Carlo M. Cipolla. ...And unlike Paul's essay, it comes
with illustrations!

[http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-
stupidit...](http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/)

------
jkraker
While I agree with some of this, there's a hubris in it that I find a bit
distasteful. It seems to claim that there's only one type of person needed for
society to thrive. Not surprisingly, it's the type that most aligns with who
he identifies himself to be.

I think that the article is using caricatured descriptions of two categories
that are more broad (people who are oriented toward change and those who are
oriented toward stability) and highlighting only the good of the preferred
group (his own) and the bad within the "other". The truth is, there are
beneficial and destructive individuals in both groups, and there are
perspectives from each that we need. I would argue that what society really
needs is not the ascendancy of one group above the other but mutual respect
and discussion of ideas between groups.

Which is kind of where he was going with the discussion of ideas. He just
didn't have a big enough tent.

~~~
clomond
I did not interpret it as hubris.

Rather, I viewed it as the differences in deliverers of progress versus
orthodoxy.

“Classic progressivism” / “Enlightenment” principles have across the globe
been under attack from all over the place, including from within the depths of
the worlds leading institutions.

Given that so much of the peace, prosperity and progress (both socially and
technologically) have been driven by safe environments for the “aggressive
independents” - I view this essay as a call out for us to do better.

Those who value stability are an important part to ground the bad new ideas
from taking hold in the vein of progress, but traditionalists are by very
definition not how progress is actually made.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> I did not interpret it as hubris.

I mean, he refers to the "passively conventional minded" as "sheep". Whether
or not that's true, it's still dripping with condescension.

I agree with the parent commenter. I largely agree with PG's essay, but it's
also telling that he doesn't see (or at least, doesn't comment) on any
potential negatives from "aggressive independently minded" folks. If anything,
a lot of the current backlash I see in the technology realm is where
entrepreneurs and "visionaries" promised us enlightenment and the world, but
it didn't quite work out that way. The pitch for social media was that it was
supposed to bring the world closer and let people develop more and stronger
relationships. Yeah, how'd that turn out...

~~~
clomond
Very good point, missed that.

I suppose re: your social media point (I have long ago soured on most of it
personally) that, rather than ridding away and decrying the negatives with
tech and social media as a result of progress, really what needs to happen is
social media needs its own set of reforms in order to have its “supposed
vision” be actualized.

The route of addicting users for increased “engagement” while optimizing for
nothing else has successfully poisoned the well of good intentions (and
possibilities). But still, and this relates to the heart of the essay itself:
I believe the path to solve this is by moving forward, making the systems
better (or providing new ones). Rather than rejecting them outright. But maybe
that is the raging optimist in me talking.

------
cjfd
Regarding the use of the 'aggressively conventional minded'. When I was
younger I would think that these kind of people were mostly just detrimental
to society but I have come to see that they sometimes have a use. It is this
kind of people who were the first to see that immigration and multiculturalism
have their limits. For instance, salafism cannot just be seen as just another
opinion that people can have. Of course, the 'agressively conventional minded'
would put it in a bit more stark words than 'have their limits' and would also
extend their warning messages to far greater groups than actually warranted
but the other three types of people might just close their eyes to the whole
problem. Generally, the 'aggressively conventional minded' can be helpful when
a society is in danger of degrading into lawlessnes. They will be the first to
sound the alarm and sometimes they are right.

~~~
mantap
Salafism itself is aggressive conventional-mindednessness. I'm sure they would
say that it is the west that is sliding into lawlessness. The laws are very
different but the thinking is the same.

------
oisdk
"Here's a taxonomy of people that I just made up. There are four types of
people, classified by superficial characteristics. Actually, this
classification is an extremely strong indicator for behaviour, certainly
stronger than other indicators. How do I know this? I am very smart and I say
so.

Based on this fact, I notice that the social-justicy types of today bear some
superficial and extremely tenuous resemblance to the pro-slavery types of
yesterday. Really makes you think."

I'm sorry but this comes across as total nonsense to me. Any "there are x
types of people" stuff always reads as astrology for people with STEM degrees,
especially when it's as ill-supported as the types given in this article.

Also the article is pretty ahistorical: being "pro-slavery" was absolutely not
the unanimous consensus that we like to pretend it was today. There was
widespread opposition to slavery: many viewed it as an obvious moral evil.
France banned slavery in 1315, for goodness' sake. People _knew_ it was wrong.

In actual fact, the type of people arguing against abolition were people in a
much more similar position to Graham: the Economist famously urged delay with
regards to abolition, fearing what freed slaves might get up to. Graham's
notion that "actually, I'm much more like the abolitionists than slaveowners
because we're both such iconoclasts" is extremely weak and, on its face, a
little ridiculous.

(also: does Graham really think he's going against the grain with this stuff?
Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship is about as
mainstream a position as there is. It would be hard to pick a more
"conventionally-minded" opinion than "I think free speech is good")

~~~
da39a3ee
> Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship is about as
> mainstream a position as there is

Not at all. I am 40. My father and one of my brothers share that position with
me, but every single one of my friends and acquaintances from universities and
workplaces, in the USA and in the European country in which I grew up, if they
make their position clear on social media, it is in line with the progressive
left and thus implicitly at least supportive of "cancel culture" and
censorship.

~~~
oisdk
> it is in line with the progressive left and thus implicitly at least
> supportive of "cancel culture" and censorship.

It's very easy to say everyone is in favour of cancel culture if you say that
_any_ support of the "progressive left" amounts to support for cancel culture.

~~~
da39a3ee
That's fair, I didn't make my case very well there.

------
mywittyname
> In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves was to
> congregate in a handful of places

> That may not work this time though,

Ah yes, the classic, "things used to be so much better" argument. Which yeah,
if you ignore things like McCarthyism then it probably seems that way. I'm
curious how many black, female professor feel that they would have faced less
intolerance in American universities before the intolerance wave of the 1980s.

I personally see tolerance as a trade-off in a lot of scenarios. Tolerating
discrimination necessarily infringes on the freedoms and well-being of the
victims. And tolerating anti-discrimination infringes on the freedoms of the
aggressors. Both groups cannot be equally free in such a matter, because the
freedom of one is at the expense of another.

------
MikeOfAu
I don't like his analysis. I don't think it models what's going on currently.
And because of that, it doesn't allow us to think about the problem correctly.

IMO, the key thing that's happened since 2010 is that there has been a coup on
"the progressive side" of politics, with "Classical Social Justice" (MLK-like)
being replaced with "Critical Social Justice". It has been a mostly silent
coup, until recently.

There's been a dramatic change, and most people on the left don't even realise
it has happened, much less what it means. The shift is from empiricism,
universalism, justice, equality of opportunity, and liberalism to ... frankly,
pretty much the opposite of those values: lived experience, identity groups
competing with winners and losers, maoist group-think, purity spirals, etc.
The profoundness of the change can't be overstated.

IMO, the good people of the Left (classic liberals) have to take it back from
those that have stolen it (the Critical Social Justic people). But, I'm not
even sure that's even possible now. It has gone too far—what a disaster.

And because "classic liberals" want the left to go back to how it was ... they
have almost become "the conservatives of the left" and they have been forced
weirdly towards the centre - except those to the left of them are now more
facist than those to their right. So weird.

Bottom line: the illiberal, Clitical Methods Left now holds sway (Newspapers,
Hollywood, Universities) and it isn't going anywhere in a hurry.

The worst part about this is: the current sensemaking apparatus (newspapers,
etc) has been hollowed out by the Internet. And they aren't even capable of
analysis any more ... just activism (as a business model ... a way of
generating clicks). How can a democracy function when the population is not
informed? I really like Eric Wienstien's analogy for this: the Media has now
become like Iago in Othello, whispering madness into the ear of those that
will listen (on both sides).

All very broken. Suddenly.

------
ggreer
I enjoyed this essay, but I think PG missed one aspect of the recent cultural
changes: Even though startups are founded by the aggressively independent-
minded, they have _insane_ amounts of ideological conformity.

Many people with beliefs that are widespread in the US (pro-life, pro-gun,
Republican, etc) are now "in the closet" in the Bay Area. Don't believe me?
10% of San Franciscans voted for Trump in 2016. Yet of all the people I've
worked with in the past four years, not a single one of them has publicly
admitted to doing so. 14 percent of Californians own guns, but again, nobody
I've worked with is "out of the closet" as a gun owner. That is an amazing
coincidence. Let's say I've worked closely with 50 people in the past 4 years
(the actual number is higher). If each one has a 10% chance of voting for
Trump, there is a 99.5% chance that I've worked directly with a Trump voter.
It's a 99.95% chance that I've worked with a gun owner. Yet based on
everything I hear at work, you'd never suspect that such people exist. They're
like dark matter.

If that's what life is like at companies founded by people who are
aggressively independent-minded, I shudder to think how bad it is at companies
run by the aggressively conventional-minded.

~~~
projektfu
Coming from where I live, it's surprising to think of any of those (pro-life,
pro-gun, or Trump voter) being quiet about it, so my feeling is that they are
nonexistent in your circles, not quiet. But perhaps they are indeed closeted
there.

FWIW, I also thought that SV (though not SF) was full of firearm enthusiasts
and prepper types, but that's probably an uninformed view from the other side
of the country.

~~~
ggreer
I'm in one of those categories and I have managed to sniff out a few other
people, but it's all very hush-hush. I'm the only one who is "out of the
closet" in any way, and that's just because I didn't realize that people in
blue areas found guns so repulsive.

------
hkt
This does somewhat come off as cod philosophy. There have been ample studies
in group psychology and minority influence dating back to the mid 20th
century, and the fact is that independent thinkers have massive influence
wherever they go. See here for a reasonable primer, key thinkers are Asch and
Moscovici:

[https://www.simplypsychology.org/minority-
influence.html](https://www.simplypsychology.org/minority-influence.html)

So, the whole "rules to restrain the conformist sheeple" thing doesn't really
apply. The author has created a category, put himself in it, then heaped
praise on it. Neither edifying nor tasteful. Sorry.

------
breuleux
I'm a bit uncomfortable with how he romanticizes the "aggressively
independent" quadrant as being the quadrant of startup founders, great
innovators and Galileo (those with good ideas), even though that quadrant also
clearly contains anti-vax leaders, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler (those with
bad ideas). I'm sorry I had to go there, but it's true. People in both
aggressive quadrants are extremely dangerous.

I'm also uncomfortable with his defence of free will because of how...
_conventional_ it is. It's nothing I haven't read a million times before. Like
it or not, "free speech is good" is one of the most conventional statements
one could make in current society, and it is consequently pushed by a lot of
aggressively conventional people. Whether they are right or not is besides the
point here. The point is that it is not, as portrayed, a fight between the
independent-minded and the conventional-minded. It is perfectly reasonable for
independent-minded people to question it, as they would question any other
widespread norm, and a lot of its staunchest proponents are conventional-
minded.

------
rafiki6
As with all human attempts to categorize things, the 4 categories should
actually be a spectrum, and the ends of the spectrum should be called into
question based on PG's definition here. I mostly agree. I think I probably
fall on the more "independent-minded" end of the spectrum (as we all like to
think). But there is value in conformism and value in independence of thought.
PG should realize the fact that he wrote this essay and is still alive is a
good example of where things are today vs. in the era of feudalism or even the
era of WW2 :)

I agree with his take on academia though. That whole institution is limping
along.

------
WesternStar
I think the idea that people are the same no matter what the rules are just
isn't true. It stated as though it is obvious and I need evidence that that is
the case. The rest of the argument falls apart based on that point.

------
webmaven
_> "[A]ny process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes.
All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of
work, so it ends up being done by the stupid."

This is pg conflating conformity (because _conformists* would largely be the
ones choosing to undertake the work of deciding which ideas to ban) with
stupidity, which... is pretty telling... and wrong.

Intelligence (to the extent that we even understand what it is) seems largely
orthogonal to _both_ of the axes pg presents in his essay, and isn't strongly
correlated with any particular personality traits at all.

~~~
dennis_jeeves
Good points.

------
zucker42
It's certainly an interesting framework for thinking about things, and some of
the thoughts seem aligned with my ideas on this issues. The problem is that I
think everybody, including and especially people who view themselves as
independently-minded, is susceptible to conformism and a lack of ideological
independence. It seems to me like a basic fact of our biology, or at least
very ingrained in our culture, that we develop ideas based on identification
and solidarity with groups we belong to. It's true of politicians, VC firm
leaders, tech workers, economists, and even the most earnest scientists. The
idea that there is a class of people who are "independently-minded" and
therefore somehow more intellectually useful is flawed because people tend to
have interesting, unique ideas in some areas and ideas which amount to little
more than parroting a group belief in others.

Along these lines, the article argues that conformism is independent of rules
(and it implies also independent of context), but I don't think it gives
sufficient evidence for this point. It also doesn't agree with my experience;
I was a bit of "goody-two-shoes" in K-12 (i.e. a passive conformist), but now
my political outlook is niche, I try to think scientifically about the world,
and I'd self-judge to be passive independently-minded person.

> Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded

This reads as extremely overconfident, and in my judgement it is probably
false. I think tech as an industry faces the same issues with group-think that
any large-enough community is bound to face, and I don't think Silicon Valley
is a pinnacle of enlightened, humanist society. The whole article to some
extent reads like "if more people were more like Paul Graham, the world would
be better". Obviously, that's the not the argument of the article (and to be
fair, it's probably true the world would be better with more Paul Grahams),
but its interesting I got an impression of that sentiment in an article about
the _dangers_ of conformism. And it's also interesting that it's not the first
time I've read a very similar argument in recent weeks.

In case I seem overly harsh, I want to clarify it was a thought-provoking
article I enjoyed reading.

------
zzo38computer
There may also be some in between conformism/aggressive and having in
different cases and different times.

"I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had
they been white and living in the South before abolition?" My own response to
such question might be, "How should I know? Such a thing is counterfactual and
I do not know the answer."

I believe the discussion of ideas should not be banned; we need full freedom
of speech and discussion of ideas. (Especially to complain about the
government is necessary.)

------
areoform
There are many ways to parse this essay, but it is emotionally challenging to
give feedback, lest the charge of being conventional minded is levied against
you. However, I doubt that is pg's intention. This comment is my good faith
attempt at a measured response.

pg mentions universities multiple times, with the implicit and explicit
statement that they were centers of revolution and non-conformist thought.
While that is partly true, it's not the whole truth. History remembers a
different, more complicated reality.

Lise Meitner was the second woman in the world to gain a doctorate in physics.
When she started, women weren't allowed to go to college, one of humanity's
greatest minds spent her youth as a teacher. It was the only career available
to her. When she tried to start doing research, she was refused,

> The only difficulty was that Hahn told me in the course of our conversation
> that he had been given a place in the institute directed by Emil Fischer,
> and that Emil Fischer did not allow any women students into his lectures or
> into his institute. So Hahn had to ask Fischer whether he would agree to our
> starting work together. And after Hahn had spoken to Fischer, I went to him
> to hear his decision and he told me his reluctance to accept women students
> stemmed from an unfortunate experience he had had with a Russian student
> because he had always been worried lest her rather exotic hairstyle result
> in her hair catching alight on the Bunsen burner.

\-
[https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...](https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull6-1/06101400412.pdf)

Fischer relented with pressure from Hahn, but in some cases, it took nearly
half a decade for people to allow her to work with them. She lost years
banging her head against the wall. What else could she have discovered had she
gotten the right resources from the start?

She prevailed against these barriers, but she was never recognized as an
equal. Recognition eluded her. Lise and Otto discovered fission together, Hahn
got the Nobel, she didn't.

Decades afterwards, the first Pulsar was detected by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She
helped build the array that made the discovery. She spent her nights looking
at the data. She noticed the anomaly. She championed it when her supervisor
dismissed it as a glitch. Her persistence paid off, and her supervisor got the
Nobel.

Women have never been accepted as equal. Even at universities. How radical and
non-conformist could they be when they repeated the same mistakes as the
societies around them? They excluded people for being Jewish, for being born
with the wrong sex organs, for having the wrong skin color, for being the
wrong person. They were radical along some axes, but conformist along others.

Things are better today, but women continue to be overlooked broadly and in
academia. Women are discriminated against for "reasonable concerns" when it
comes to pregnancies, leaves, healthcare needs... Systemic reviews have shown
that doctors take reports of pain from women less seriously than they do from
men. By a factor that gets multiplied if you're black or queer. Some people
still have to work twice as hard to get half as much. They were just dealt
with a shitty card.

It is happening now, against someone as we speak. At prestigious teaching and
research hospitals across the country, prejudice and the status quo are
dealing out a crap hand to someone not counted as lucky few. Someone who will
have to live with this moment for the rest of their life. My favorite anecdote
is relayed by a woman who went in after a knitting accident; she was worried
about losing dexterity and told her doctor that. The doctor assured her
nothing would go wrong and started to patch her up. By happenstance, one of
the woman's students happened to wander by and greeted her with the words,
"Professor". And the doctor stopped. He asked her if she was a professor at
the prestigious local university. She said yes. And before she could ask why
she was wheeled into surgery to ensure she wouldn't lose dexterity. What cards
would an ordinary black woman would have been dealt had she presented with the
same problems?

Young people on campuses see these shitty cards. Why is it a surprise that
they seek to rebel? Universities have always been the hallmark of radicals,
and these are the new radicals. It is simple to 'both sides' this, but their
anger - magnified and disproportionate it may be - comes from a legitimate
place. It comes from the rebukes of the past and present. The big and small
injustices that make the world. And it is their clumsy attempt to create a
better world.

With all due respect to pg, the problem with the essay and this scale is that
it is not well calibrated. Conformist along which directions? Aggressive in
what ways? To what ends? To what degree? To what measure?

At times it seems pg puts the (admittedly foolish) yale undergrads going on
about cultural appropriation in the same bucket as the Kim Davis, anti-women's
rights and 'religious rights' crowd. The former is an overreaction by the
young and hot-headed. The latter is an enormous, organized effort to take
rights away from others and to force everyone else to conform to their rules
of society. The former a miasma in civil discourse. The latter an organized
attempt to strip women of their right to determine what's right for their
bodies.

On what scale are we equating the two? By what means of calibration are these
in the same quadrant and to the same degree?

The idea in this essay is valuable. The insight is valid. And I believe that
it is a good faith attempt to understand the world. However, it fails to
resonate for me. It fails to track as it appears to be made for a world I am
not a part of. No one invited me to the party.

------
zests
Let's pretend that such a projection exists and we can assign people to points
on the cartesian plane. This begs the question, how do the points change over
time?

Mathematically speaking, we can add to our model by assuming there is some
notion of a flow or a vector field on the quadrant that pulls individual
people/points in directions. There are also people moving in their own
directions either due to inherit personal characteristics or perhaps life
events impacting them.

How do we model this field? We could start by creating a bunch of "attractors"
or points on the plane that people are attracted to. Think of an attractor
like a very massive body and the gravitational pull it has on other bodies. If
these attractors do exist, where are they on the compass?

Some attractors might be "abstract ideals" that naturally draw people to each
part of the quadrant but I'd say the biggest attractor is in fact other
people. Human beings have tribal tendencies and so if/when a lot of people
cluster on the compass it pulls even more people in. With our gravity analogy
this is like a massive star absorbing all of the mass surrounding it.

Some people have anti-conformist tendencies and don't like to belong to large
groups of like minded people. Eventually large pockets of people become
increasingly unstable and people radically disassociate with the big
attractor. This is like a supernova radically expelling mass in all
directions.

I prefer the gravity analogy because it avoids moralizing specific "locations"
on the compass. A gravitational well can occur anywhere and we can discuss
them abstractly. I think what PG is saying is that it is not a good idea to
let yourself be pulled in to the well. Just look at the wells that have
occurred in the past. All of these statements can be made with respect to an
abstract political context. Now apply them to the current context.

Does this post make any sense or is it just the ravings of a mad lunatic? Do
we believe these things because they are true or do we believe them because we
agree with their conclusion? Do we disagree because we disagree with the
conclusion?

Is it really possible to introspect and judge the validity of our own
conclusions? If anyone can answer this questions (preferably by reference to a
third party source) I'd be appreciative.

~~~
t_serpico
that was a completely pointless analogy

------
mikedilger
PGs presents a closing hope in the imagination of the aggressively
independent-minded. There is hope but no assurance that doesn't turn towards
sustained decline. The dark ages happened. Leonardo DaVinci lamtented that in
1400 he knew less than Galen did in 185 AD. The Islamic golden age also
abandoned science to religious dogma.

Still it is hard to fathom a worldwide sustained decline. Some cultural and/or
language group won't go along.

------
getpost
I suggest not putting people into quadrants and making an us-vs-them argument.
Everyone is exactly the same and also completely unique. At times, some people
appear to catalyze change, but it's everyone else that actually makes the
change.

There has always been an "immune" reaction to new ideas. That is not going to
change for the foreseeable future. Don't worry about it, just keep innovating.

------
jfarmer
If you write several essays about "the way society works" and they
consistently resolve to a protagonist who happens to be very much like
yourself, you're probably writing about your own mind, not society.

~~~
ordinaryradical
It's ironic that he describes social media as an own goal but there isn't the
introspection accompanying it that would lead to the obvious point you've made
so well.

Everyone in SV wants to be "up and to the right" in every quadrant map of
anything. How comforting to simplify life to those terms, to exceptional
winners and conventional deadweight. But if society takes your myopic vision
and resulting creation and then eats itself and all its democratic
institutions, to paraphrase Prinicpal Skinner:

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."

~~~
jfarmer
Absolutely! You can see it in this thread, even. There are folks excited by
the prospect of using the phrase "aggressively non-conformist".

pg is providing memetic ammunition for the very "culture wars" he claims he's
trying to sit out. No introspection (or at least no _evidence_ of
introspection), exactly as you say.

------
mac01021
PG's essays are always thought provoking even when factually questionable.

This one is probably both.

I don't disagree with him about the need for advanced societies to protect
free inquiry and independent thinking.

But the psychological taxonomy expounded here is simplistic and all the little
things he attaches to it, like the psychoanalysis of tattletales, are probably
not well supported by much evidence.

------
miguelmota
> The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to
> make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake
> that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid.

Especially the people who enforce the laws. Law enforcement police officers
have to follow orders without question. People who don't question things are
inherently stupid.

------
notacoward
Worth noting that the "aggressively non-conformist" quadrant includes not just
inventors and leaders but also criminals and trolls. For some reason the essay
downplays that.

Also, is it just me, or does it seem like most of pg's recent essays are
attempts to "poison the well" against anyone who might try to hold him and his
peers accountable for their contributions to the sorry state of our society?
He doesn't _directly_ attack them, but he seems to be coming at a general
"social pressure is bad" theme from multiple directions lately.

~~~
designium
I think you can apply his quadrant to usage of mask during Covid and the
result speaks for themselves:

Let's play this out for mask wearing:

Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks

Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks

Bottom Right: People who occasionally use masks, or alternatives, bandanas,
etc.

Top Right: People who don't want to use masks because of freedom.

~~~
pdonis
I would describe mask wearing somewhat differently:

Top Left: People who want to throw anyone who isn't wearing a mask in jail.

Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks everywhere, including situations
where it doesn't make sense to, because that's what the rules say.

Bottom Right: People who wear masks when it makes sense to wear them, and
don't wear masks when it makes sense not to, even if that isn't what the rules
say (for example, not wearing a mask when taking a walk outdoors where you can
easily social distance, even if the letter of the rules in your area say to
wear a mask whenever you leave your house).

Top Right: People who insist on pointing out that the rules on mask wearing
are arbitrary and don't allow for common sense, even as they wear masks when
common sense says you ought to.

~~~
flyflyFenix
> Top Right: People who insist on pointing out that the rules on mask wearing
> are arbitrary and don't allow for common sense, even as they wear masks when
> common sense says you ought to.

You mean "... as they don't wear masks ..." , correct? Otherwise I think you
are leaving out the people who reject masks at every opportunity.

~~~
pdonis
_> You mean "... as they don't wear masks ..." , correct?_

No. Wearing masks when common sense says you ought to, in the current
situation, is independent-minded, not conformist. (For example, consider: the
same person would have been wearing a mask _before_ any guidance or rules were
issued about it at all, since it took quite a while for such guidance and
rules to catch up with the actual situation. A Bottom Left person would have
been waiting for some guidance or rules to be issued. A Top Left person would
have been calling out the mask wearer for overreacting, after all, things
can't possibly be that bad if no guidance or rules have been issued requiring
people to wear masks, right?)

 _> I think you are leaving out the people who reject masks at every
opportunity._

Strictly speaking, yes, those could also count as Top Right, but I wanted to
emphasize the fact that Top Right does not require stupidity.

------
jes
A simple graphic of the four quadrants would have improved my experience in
reading this article. I was surprised to not find one.

------
libra1
Most of the "free inquiry" that has been banned from universities is related
to sensitive issues like race and gender. I don't see any universities out
there restricting free inquiry on say, the sciences. Is there really that much
social good that will come out of exploring racism and misogyny?

------
defnotashton2
What he really after US vs them tendency of tribalism, he is upset at the
overreach of the left and their lacking self criticism. Then ironically
lacking self criticism presents an us vs them argument.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

F. Scott

------
epeus
I think this previous rebuttal to pg's pretence of broad mindedness still
applies [https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-
askin...](https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-asking-to-be-
eaten-5f021c0c0650)

------
bePoliteAlways
Convention and independently-minded is based on "majority" belief. With time
"majority" belief changes so the one who was "independently-minded" becomes
"conventional". Not sure how to categorize the old-convention minded one as.

------
r4vik
50% of the words in this article could have been replaced with an image

    
    
      +-----------------------------------+------------------------------------+
      |                                   |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |
      |           tattletales             |       naughty ones                 |
      |                                   |                                    | aggressive
      |                                   |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |
      +------------------------------------------------------------------------+
      |                                   |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |  passive
      |                                   |       dreamy ones                  |
      |        sheep                      |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |
      |                                   |                                    |
      +-----------------------------------+------------------------------------+
           Conventional minded                    Independent minded

~~~
tome
Yikes, would you mind editing that so that it has half as many (ASCII)
columns, and about one fifth as many rows? As it is it is taking up my entire
screen.

~~~
r4vik
not the easiest thing to edit in this text area but I've reduced the height

------
tgflynn
This is a good essay, but I don't think he gets it quite right. I agree with
the horizontal axis: conventional vs. independent but I don't think the view
he presents of aggressiveness is quite accurate.

I do think that a major axis for classifying humans is the extent to which
they desire to impose their views on others through coercion. This seems to be
partly what Graham is trying to capture but his description doesn't seem to
quite fit. In particular I have a hard time thinking of anyone who wants to
impose their own independent-mindedness on others through coercion. Typically
they just want the conventional minded to leave them alone so they can work on
their independent ideas and hopefully prove them right. Of course they may
want to convince a few people, such as investors, of the value of their ideas
before they have been proven, but that isn't the same kind of coercion that
the aggressively conventional-minded employ to silence dissent.

------
happy-go-lucky
You refuse to conform to conventions because you're independent-minded. As a
business owner, to what extent would you allow your workers to be
nonconformist?

By the way, I belong to the right upper quadrant, and I cannot answer my own
question without being hypocritical.

~~~
solmans
We'd all like to think we belong to Paul's upper right quadrant (which, mind
you, isn't even very well defined) but in truth you, me, and even Paul himself
are more conformist than we think and recognising that is an important step in
being intelligent and not shielding yourself from criticism.

For example, I don't think wanting to go and pursue a business idea is
independent minded. The overwhelming majority of people would like to do this,
even your employees. Actually putting in the effort isn't very independent
minded either since it's mostly a matter of how much capital, free time, and
social safety nets you have, not how much of a free radical you are.

------
peteretep
One of the things I dislike about _celebrity_ is the idea that because I care
what pg thinks about startups, that I should also care what he thinks about
almost anything else. His Twitter account is starting to make me think he’s
becoming Scott Adams.

~~~
drekembe
You're free to not care what he thinks about some topics, but he's also free
to still write about them and has no obligation to write only about the things
you care about.

------
darepublic
So one quadrant upvotes the posts they like, and downvotes the ones they don't
like, another quadrant simply upvotes the posts they like, another tries to
find a middle ground and mend rifts, another has no account, lurks and laughs
inside.

------
boreas
People spend so much time on the "meta-conversation" about the ecosystem of
ideas, and so little time talking about the actual ideas themselves.

What are these repressed debates people are so anxious about? Is it just race
stuff?

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>People spend so much time on the "meta-conversation"

I have wondered about that. What is your guess ? ( other than race)

------
marcus_holmes
As a (mildly) aggressive non-conformist, I prefer the motto "non serviam"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam)

------
divbzero

      aggressively conventional-minded │ aggressively independent-minded
      ─────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────
         passively conventional-minded │    passively independent-minded

------
michaelmrose
> For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-
> minded, but aggressively so.

> So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not
> independent-minded; rather the opposite

Which is it?

------
erichocean
> _And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is "Eppur si muove."_

I wonder if PG picked that specific phrase ("And yet it moves") because of the
recent brouhaha over IQ and genetics….

------
mchusma
I love PGs essays, but his take on Robert George is the opposite of what
Robert George was saying.

PG: "He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't."

Robert George from the quoted tweet: "Of course, this is nonsense. Only the
tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against
slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have
gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited
from it."

[https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/1278529694355292161](https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/1278529694355292161)

It doesn't change PG's point, but its just odd he used the quote in this way.

~~~
projektfu
Quoting:

Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

    
    
        "I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it."
    

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our
default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average,
have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are
aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively
conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have
fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest
defenders.

~~~
projektfu
They're saying the same thing, but PG added the "He's too polite..." bit as
though he didn't read past /1 in the thread.

------
sgentle
Never thought I'd see the day that a pg essay crosses over with
/r/politicalcompassmemes

The problem with "discussing ideas" as a framing is that it exists in
opposition to something. What is that something?

Those whose position favours the status quo would read it in opposition to
"not discussing ideas", which is obviously bad. However, to those who find the
status quo untenable, the opposite position is "acting on ideas".

Following pg's example, let us consider the following classic debate topic:
"is slavery good?" A plantation owner might find themselves tickled by a
lively discussion on the subject, replete with a cornucopia of Enlightenment
principles and classical liberalism and such. A slave might find this
discussion less interesting, because no outcome would lead to their freedom.

It is perhaps telling that slavery was not abolished through free inquiry or
the discussion of ideas. It was abolished through acts of state power and,
ultimately, violence. Are we to believe in an alternate history where the
South was debated out of its peculiar institution? The discussion of ideas
gave way to acting on those ideas. The alternative would be a society of
endless, meaningless rambling.

Today, if you were still debating "is slavery good?", you would not be a brave
free-thinking iconoclast, you would be either an idiot or a very devoted
racist. You would get uninvited from lectures and yelled at on Twitter, not
because your ideas are too advanced, but because they're too far behind. The
debate is over, and the actual free-thinkers have moved on.

It's sad to say, but I think the real lesson of this essay is that political
ideas are just like music taste. Whatever your parents were listening to is
outdated and embarrassing, whatever the kids are listening to is just angry
noise, and miraculously your generation was the only one to stumble upon that
which is profoundly, timelessly good.

~~~
mikhailfranco
I think you are wrong about the abolition of slavery.

Slavery had existed in almost every society throughout history (and beyond, no
doubt). The word _slave_ comes from the _Slavs_ of eastern Europe, who were
captured and enslaved by the Turks and Barbary pirates.

Then there was a unique event: Protestant (many non-conformist) groups in the
wealthiest democratic country (Britain), decided to campaign on a fundamental
principle of Enlightenment and Christian human rights. It was a vivid debate
of ideals and economic practicalities, conducted in the Mother of Parliaments,
and on the streets outside.

Britain was a major beneficiary of slavery in the American colonies and the
Caribbean. It would have renounced the trade, and the practice, in the late
18th century, but the military and economic imperatives of the French
Revolution, American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars intervened. So the British
slave trade was not abolished until 1807, and the practice of slavery itself
in 1833.

Britain also had the largest navy in the world at that time. It not just
passed laws for its empire, but also actively blockaded Atlantic ports and
intercepted the slave trade from Africa to Spanish and Portuguese colonies
(both Catholic, not a coincidence). It was later joined by the northern
_Yankee_ navy in the Atlantic and on the Barbary coast of N.Africa. Slavery
was abolished in the US and Russia (serfdom) about the same time in the 1860s,
but it lingered in Cuba and Brazil toward the end of the 19th century.

T.E.Lawrence commented on the slavery he found in Saudi Arabia during World
War 1 (1916) _[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]._ The practice of legal slavery
continued into the 1970s in the Gulf States, and the indentured servitude
practiced there today is little different (long working hours in difficult
conditions, physical isolation, confiscation of passports, non-payment of
wages, no rights in the legal system, sexual abuse of women, etc.). The fact
that these countries are undemocratic unenlightened Arabs is also not a
coincidence (Arabs seem to have an extra cultural level of racist arrogance,
over and above the intolerance of other Muslims in non-Arab countries, such
as, say, Iran or Indonesia).

~~~
joshuamorton
France outlawed slavery in 1315 (later leaders undid this, but it was illegal
for a time). Spain did as well in the 1500s. The Catholic Church condemned the
slave trade in the 1600s.

So by the time the "non-conformists" were openly discussing whether or not
slavery should be banned, the Conformists (the catholic church) had already
stated it was bad.

> The fact that these countries are undemocratic unenlightened Arabs is also
> not a coincidence (Arabs seem to have an extra cultural level of racist
> arrogance, over and above the intolerance of other Muslims in non-Arab
> countries, such as, say, Iran or Indonesia).

Yiiiiiiiiiikes.

------
bambax
I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but
the two main ones are that

1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the
various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration
with affirmation

and, more importantly

2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he
actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The people on top are the
ones that make the world move in the right direction, and the ones at the
bottom are dragging us all down. (Of course, he always ends up in the best
category himself.)

But innovation isn't good _per se_. If you invent novel ways of torturing
people (or animals, cf. the whole meat industry), that's not progress.

If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit while
everyone else suffers (the whole "gig economy"), that's not a net gain for
society, and society is legitimate in fighting you.

~~~
oldsklgdfth
> But innovation isn't good per se.

Innovation isn't anything in moral terms.

All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology
offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.

The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed
evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits
some and harms others.

~~~
Misdicorl
This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no
disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in
pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron,
...

~~~
olalonde
You could argue that automation is one of those improvements with no
disadvantage. But it can also result in people losing their jobs and those
people might be opposed to it.

I would argue that the same is true with the gig economy. It benefits the
people participating in it greatly but it also cost some people their jobs
(e.g. taxi drivers).

~~~
rorykoehler
Losing a job isn’t inherently bad. I’d only bad now because we’ve decided to
arrange society around zero sum thinking.

~~~
doctor_eval
It’s pretty inherently bad if losing your job means you can’t feed your kids
or yourself.

~~~
rorykoehler
Exactly. It’s absurd the consequences of losing your job are so fundamental.
It’s time civilisation moved forward from this.

~~~
doctor_eval
I think we probably agree 100% about this, but the reality _today_ is what’s
important to people losing their job today.

I don’t think you mean to downplay the impact of someone losing their job
today, but that’s how it came across to me.

~~~
rorykoehler
If there was ever a time we had a direct opportunity to change this dynamic
it's today.

~~~
doctor_eval
I really hope you’re right, but I don’t see it. I really want to be wrong
though. It would be amazing.

------
tgflynn
You could probably measure the extent to which HN users are aggressively-
conventional minded by how often they downvote comments without replying to
them.

------
pwdisswordfish2
Quick, someone make a political compass meme out of this!

------
easymovet
Sounds like you need an invite to Galt's Gulch

------
analbumcover
> All successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but
> aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the
> extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay.

This seems very conventional-minded, to use Graham's terminology. Thinking
that technological innovation is the hallmark of a prosperous society is
conventional thinking, at least in Western Society. As is espousal of
capitalism, democracy, etc.

I don't see aggressive independent-mindedness except in criminals, dissidents,
and radicals. He repeatedly asserts that tech CEOs are independent-minded
mavericks, but I just don't see any evidence of that.

------
courtf
I'm not quite so sure we live in a society that protects free inquiry now, and
are suddenly in danger of losing that status.

------
paedubucher
I think the example with the soccer field is great. People think and speak
differently if they know that there are taboos.

------
analog31
I wonder if a lot of people are somewhere in the middle, and also, if their
position on the quadrants is situational.

------
Balgair
In my experience, Universities in the US aren't the place to place your bets
on.

It's hard to explain in a short HN comment, so my apologies here if it's a bit
gripe-y and disjointed.

I've just gotten the feeling that the Universities, very much including the
STEM departments, are all about funding. Since the funding is largely
controlled by other professors in the field (via Study Sessions), you have to
get on the good side of many people. The after-talk drinking sessions at major
conferences are a _key_ way to do this.

If you're 'likable' and a 'big' name, then committees send funding your way.
After all, at that level, every proposal is pretty much gold anyways. I
remember a _Nature_ editor telling a class once that they could shut down the
submissions portal at about noon January 1st and see no drop in the quality of
what they published for the year. Still, _Nature_ and funding committees have
to dole out things. So, when given the choices of people you know and people
you don't, you tend to go with people you know (academic pedigree is also
super important here).

So 'rocking the boat' is very much discouraged, your mortgage depends on you
not doing that. Then the same issues that we see on Twitter occur as well. The
louder voices tend to get more 'views', as long as the voice is stating the
orthodox opinions. In STEM fields, it's less bad in terms of the research
(facts _very_ much matter), but the underlying culture is just the same as
with all humans.

If you get into the replication crisis issues, then it's the funding crunch on
steroids. Those fields tend to be all about 'name', as the facts have become
so difficult to obtain that no one could 'fact check' even if they wanted to
(nutrition, bio, psych, fMRI, etc). I'm still surprised that particle physics
hasn't fallen down this hole and I think that their 'culture' is one to look
into.

Again, apologies on the rant here. Still, heterodox opinions (not facts, to be
clear) are not the place for Universities in the US anymore.

I'd look at where all the Burners went after about 2012 to find the better
places to deal with the aggressively independent minded. Ephemerisle is a
thought, but those guys are a bit wacko in terms of covid-19 safety, though
that may just be a side effect. Maybe the Rainbow gatherings?

------
Dumblydorr
This is one of PG's weaker essays. He attempts to glide between psychology,
history, politics, and philosophy without proper evidence or background in
those areas. His construct is somewhat interesting on the surface but is only
supported by his own feelings and his own anecdata, he doesn't point to
anything relevant or similar written by actual experts.

~~~
threatofrain
Yeah but unless there's someone who is a domain expert, deeply affiliated with
experts from other domains, willing to drop into HN to give free advice...
gurus are what you get.

As popular as HN is, there are surprisingly few people willing to do this.

~~~
minikites
Why would they even try on HN, a site that famously looks down on any subject
that isn't STEM or closely adjacent?

------
dencodev
I'm not sure I find much meaning in this essay because everyone's definition
of "conventional" and "independent" depends on their own bias. PG's own
definition of independently minded seems to be "they have all the new ideas".
If that's the case, then universities are absolutely a place of independently
minded people when compared to the baby boomers and older generations.

Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that overwhelmingly
impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I consider "conventionally
minded" and definitely counts as a "new idea" when viewing it through the lens
of racism and homophobia in America since its inception. As others posted,
it's not clear to me what PG is referring to as conventionally minded at
universities, but the issues I mentioned are typically at the forefront of
political issues at schools these days.

Here's what I find conventionally minded thinking: supporting capitalism and
accumulating ridiculous amounts of wealth without guilt. If you're the type of
person who sees an abnormally high level of sociopaths in non-profits[1] and
honestly believes the "defining quality of nonprofits is to make no profit,
not to do good" has any significant basis in reality, perhaps that says more
about your bias against non-profits than it does about the people in it. And
that bias, to me, reeks of conformity.

1:
[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040)

~~~
philwelch
> Speaking out against racism, bigotry, and systemic issues that
> overwhelmingly impact POC and the LGBTQ+ community is not what I consider
> "conventionally minded"

It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so
in unison.

I think there’s a part of pg’s essay that’s doing a lot more work than people
realize, because everyone keeps missing it:

“ When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what,
and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's the rules set by
adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. _So a
pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not
independent-minded; rather the opposite._ ”

~~~
dencodev
>It’s so unconventional that almost every Fortune 500 corporation has done so
in unison.

For literally the first time in history, and most of the Fortune 500 "speaking
out" is just empty words without any real action. Look how progressive Amazon
is, putting the BLM banner on their homepage for a couple weeks. Meanwhile
Bezos is still perpetuating awful working conditions that disproportionately
impact his POC employees.

I'm in my 30s and rules in my life are not set by my peers. They're set by the
older generations who overwhelmingly feel and act like "Fuck you, got mine".
My life is overwhelmingly dictated by the rich and powerful and privileged,
everywhere from where I live and how I live to where I work and how I work. I
have very little say in how my life works, and it's rare that I ever see
someone my age having any impact on that.

Also, people (and university students) don't live in a bubble. It is
absolutely independently minded to grow up around parents and teachers that
all have the same beliefs and then to be able to form your own beliefs that
diverge largely from theirs. Just because you have people around you that made
the same step doesn't make you conformist.

~~~
philwelch
So you have an external locus of control, that sounds like a personal problem
but let’s roll with it. Maybe you’re right and the rules aren’t set by your
peers, but that wasn’t the point of the example. The point was conventional-
minded people can often feel rebellious by following a certain garden path of
“conventional rebellion” that has been specifically laid out for them. That
doesn’t actually make them independent-minded. In fact, you’re even worse off
than you think because both the society that you live in and the specific way
in which you choose to rebel against it are both completely outside your
control and presented to you as closed systems that you have no input or
contribution to.

~~~
soundnote
As one example, flouting your skepticism in r/atheism is _easy_.

Coming out as an atheist in the Bible Belt without living on r/atheism first?

Orders of magnitude more difficult.

Being a pro-social justice liberal in the universities is trivial - the whole
social environment supports it.

Be an open, conservative Catholic in one?

We are anti-slavery today because we really believe it, but let's not forget
that one huge factor in us being so is that it's laughably easy to be so in
the modern West.

Environment matters.

------
LukaszWiktor
The first paragraph would me much easier to comprehend if it was a picture.

------
anonmidniteshpr
I don't know what @pg means by aggressive or passive. In what respects? Maybe
I don't understand what passive or rules-oriented are like because I live in a
VW that has disco bar lights, a train horn, and I do basically whatever,
wherever I want.

 _Rules are for fools._

------
dennis_jeeves
Examples of what what the the aggressively conventional minded insist upon:

\- Let's have a (pandemic) lock down. Given reason: let's protect everybody.
Real reason: they are idiots who who cannot reason out the nuance of pros vs
cons of lock down.

\- Make masks mandatory. Given reason: let's protect everybody. Real reason:
they are idiots who who cannot reason out the nuance of personal protection vs
public harm

\- Make rich pay their taxes. Given reason: they are not paying their fair
share, Teal reason: they are jealous of the rich)

\- Send all kids to school. Given reason: we need to 'educate' everybody, real
reason: In their narrow world view they cannot fathom that at least some
parents can do a better job of 'educating' their kids than conventional
schools.

The concept of freedom that does not harm others is entirely lost among these
sociopath individuals.

------
seankimdesign
Thank God for people like PG who are brave and wise enough to be able to craft
such beautiful and timely essays. McCarthyism may be fashionable again, but
we'll endure unscathed as long as writings such as these continue to be
written.

------
thom
Good grief man, if you can only detect new ideas when they erupt from the
mouths of startup CEOs, and you can't credit things like social justice and
equality as anything but conformist (despite having been denied millions if
not billions of people), then you're not 'independent', you're just incredibly
narrow minded.

~~~
chippy
The ideas of social justice and equality spring from the independent quadrant.
These ideas have become the rules that conventional quadrant follow and
expose.

This doesn't seem to contradict itself.

~~~
Miner49er
Social justice and true equality aren't conformist ideas though. We live at a
time when wealth inequality is around the highest since our country has kept
track and you think equality is a mainstream conformist idea?

~~~
jessaustin
Many people have been so misled by education and media consumption that they
have no idea what is going on. It is a commonplace that conformists will
profess to beliefs that they regularly undermine. E.g., the people who
"support the protests" but still whinge about how they're too
"confrontational" and "violent".

~~~
jschwartzi
Or they recognize that people have a right to protest but don’t appreciate the
small minority who use it as an opportunity to incite violence.

~~~
jessaustin
They're protesting the policing of minorities, and you stand at the ready to
police their protesting... by asserting their minority status! In lots of
protests this isn't a "small minority". Please think more carefully. The
author of TFA would not appreciate your aggressive conformity.

~~~
jschwartzi
Hey man, I agree completely that the police suck. But what I think is
happening is there are two groups here:

* Protestors of police brutality who are in the main completely peaceful and capable of self-policing. These people tend to do normal protest things like blocking the streets, yelling at cars, holding signs, and similar. That's totally fine and should be protected by law. Their leaders are often seen keeping the rest of the group from pushing up against barricades and otherwise inciting violence.

* Small groups of what I can only describe as fringe counterculture people who are hiding in these protest groups waiting for an opportunity to incite violence. These people use the mask laws in many localities to hide their identity, and are doing things like dropping piles of bricks off in protest zones, throwing molotov cocktails into fast food restaurants and running, breaking windows and looting stores, and pushing the peaceful protestors into the riot control police. These are most certainly non-conformists, but we should not tolerate these behaviors if we want to live in a civil society. And the peaceful protestors are getting caught up in the dragnets.

The police make no effort to distinguish between the two groups in most cases.
During protests in the 60's there's ample evidence that the police were part
of the second group. So it's probable the violence is being incited by certain
groups who are interested in silencing the peaceful protestors.

If that makes me an aggressive conformist to hold those views, then I will
gladly be one. Non-conformity should not be the goal. And frankly if this is
how it's defined, it's a stupid label.

~~~
jessaustin
Eventually there will be "ample evidence" that police are also members of
_this_ "second group". A Minneapolis cop vandalizing a business was identified
on Facebook already. (Don't link to the police denials; rational observers
take those as proof.) City governments have a lot easier access to pallets of
bricks and the equipment to transport same than poor kids have. Authoritarians
do the same thing over and over again because it works over and over again.

None of that matters. The point of the protests, to combat USA racism in
general and also the specific racism of violent USA police, is more important
than the form of the protests. If we truly do support these goals, we won't be
sidetracked by potential insurance claims of large corporations. Instead we
will interrogate myths we've accepted by dint of constant media gaslighting.
MLK did _not_ oppose destructive protest in general. Destructive protests are
_not_ counterproductive; in many instances they have had far more significant
positive effect than any number of candlelit vigils. The police don't work for
us (even if "us" means "us white folks"); they work for wealthy property
owners. Many black Americans _do_ support effective protests, even if the only
black Americans allowed on cable news are very worried about "white
anarchists". Much of the destruction you fear is the rational action of black
citizens who've had to deal with this shit for a really long time.

~~~
jschwartzi
The problem I have with violence is that there will always be people who are
caught in the crossfire. Violence begets violence and you have to be prepared
to lay down arms at some point or you will always be at war. My fear is mainly
that when people resort to violence, the same people who hide out in the
peaceful groups come out of the woodwork, and they take advantage of the
situation to their own ends.

Violence is ugly, and it's hard to control, especially when it's group-on-
group violence. It's surprisingly easy for the oppressed to become the
oppressor when the smoke settles. If you have a way to avoid that, then go
right ahead.

~~~
jessaustin
This fear is overblown. We've had racist violence from USA police for their
entire existence. Nothing that has been tried so far has eliminated it. Now,
let's try something else. I would refer you to NFAC, who have performed
several armed public actions without causing an escalation in violence.

------
frabbit
I mostly agree with this: am pretty much a Free Speech absolutist.

However, I can't help but suspect that the reason we're hearing arguments
about this now is because the liberal-Left are aggressively exercising their
intolerance instead of the conservative-Right, who have had it all their way
for a long time.

Aside: I don't think lumping liberals and leftists in together is useful.
There is a strong dislike of the trend towards censorship voiced by those that
are economically on the left. The embrace of censorship is coming from the
corporate/capitalist/liberal side of things. Most on the left are well aware
that censorship will be used against them first.

~~~
tenuousemphasis
Can you define what you mean by free speech? That speech alone should not be
punished by the state? Or that speech should have no social consequences?

Because to me "the liberal-Left exercising their intolerance" could also be
viewed as exercising their freedom of association.

~~~
frabbit
Punished by the state specifically. I don't see how you could enforce speech
_not_ having social consequences, nor what the purpose of such speech would be
if that were possible.

~~~
deanCommie
If that is the case, then free speech is not in danger. As you say, "the
liberal-Left are aggressively exercising their intolerance".

The liberal left is not in power in the government. So are they not just
exercising their free speech?

~~~
frabbit
I take your point, and I am slightly on the fence about this and trying to
figure it out. I found this¹ a very useful criticism of the Taibbi line-of-
though(that I am also very persuaded by)

I will admit:

a) individuals and groups should be able to withdraw their co-operation, money
and labor from other individuals or groups with whom they disagree. b) the
examples which have happened in the recent flare-up fall squarely into a)

However, where things get complicated is the definition of the state and how
practical control is exercised over what can and cannot be said. The state is
more than just the government, it is also traditionally the press, the army,
the judiciary and the clergy.

We are an 'interesting' situation now where the function of the press is to a
large extent assumed by Facebook, Google and (indirectly) CloudFlare and the
ISPs. Concretely they can prevent the spreading of information, the
publication of ideas for reasons that they deem justified.

The power to suppress and censor ideas has been exercized against what some
would characterize as 'right wing' causes such as the publication of anti-
semitic 'hate speech'. It has also be exercized against 'left wing' causes
such as the publication of footage and reporting showing the massacres of
Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army.

The only unique, useful thing about the internet is the possibility that it
offers in allowing us to circumvent the censors. With that we get access to
the Wikileaks material, the details of financial crimes carried out by our
politicians and business people. We also get mis-information and pornography.

The calls to boycott Facebook come from disparate places: government
functionaries and political parties who wish to discipline the internet and
control the narrative (no more upsetting the funding model, no more
embarassing leaks showing our boys murdering civilians); activists who wish to
protest specific social issues.

In order for their wishes to become concrete there needs to be mechanism/s put
in place by Facebook, Google, CloudFlare that enable them to suppress
information: for good or bad reasons.

The people who will be in control of these mechanisms are the people who got
us here.

The next round of popular protests won't happen because we will not have seen
the video of a human being shot in their car or having their neck crushed.

Tools of centralized power are used by those in power. That's not likely to be
you and me.

1) [https://newrepublic.com/article/158346/willful-blindness-
rea...](https://newrepublic.com/article/158346/willful-blindness-reactionary-
liberalism)

------
davegri
Did Paul Graham just repackage DnD Alignment?

------
smhost
This is so meandering and incoherent that it's hard to comment on, but the
idea that silicon valley and finance types are "independent-minded" is
downright laughable. It's pretty clear that those types are in lock-step with
each other ideologically, maybe broadly split between east-coast and west-
coast aesthetically.

This categorization is such nonsense. People in the hard sciences don't neatly
fall into a type, and in fact is almost the opposite. In physics and math
(maybe especially in math and physics), people are split right down the middle
between conventional and independent. pg just doesn't seem to understand the
internal politics of the sciences.

~~~
avs733
Excessive dimension reduction is a scourge in social science, and in societal
commentary by just about everyone. So, yes - I agree with your point entirely,
and I think it can be made much more concrete honestly by adding another
dimension:

The why of independence

Notably, that is the harder one to create a surface level observation of. But
take his favored quadrant:

"And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-
minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to
question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the
opposite."

Is it merely being told what to do causes them to question something? So its
the rule demands questioning of it? or is what he is really looking for that
they question the reasoning and demand valid reasoning? One is just
contrarian, one is self aware. Some people start with contrarianism as a
poorly articulated path to demanding valid reasoning...At times Elon Musk
sounds like a contrarian, at times he sounds like a reasoned risk taker, I'm
not investing in that.

In the end, Paul sounds a bit like he's trying to take a roundabout way to
make fun of the high school jocks...

~~~
chillacy
> I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which
> quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the
> beliefs prevalent in their society.

Personality is a real topic of psychology research, the current model is a
five-factor model
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)

But the distributions are not bi-modal, so in reality most people are near the
center of this quadrant with (I assume normally distributed) outliers.

------
sytelus
Not sure why being conformist or not is important. Isn’t the more desirable
thing is how you reason that your belief will lead to your desired result?
What evidence have you taken in account and what risks you are aware of? How
do you deal with uncertainty and how do you strive to get additional evidence.

For example, if you believe in vaccinations, are you conformist? These 4
quadrants even applicable universally for wide variety of topics for any
person?

------
TomMckenny
[edit]

I had a lengthy more thoughtful post here but it seems I had mistaken a
pronouncement for a discussion. The near instant voting response made me
realize that absurdity, especially in light of the fact that I am responding
to the second of two posts by the site's governance where college professors
are singled out as a threat to freedom even as unmarked vans and secretive
police round up the "dreaded" diversity proponents in Portland and other
cities.

So I shall leave it to persons devoted to maximizing short term profits from
new products and the "freethinking" commentary from persons seeking funding
from same, to bloviate on how to "protect" society from intellectuals and
liberalism.

------
jariel
The oddest thing about this essay - is that the people he's kind of lamenting
- the 'banners' particularly in academia and the press - are by far not
classically conventional or authoritative types.

That's where this analysis goes way wrong.

'Ban culture' is driven by 'aggressive antagonists' who generally have power
through the mob, or some kind of 'new' authority, they are 'anti classical
power' in their very identity.

I would characterise them as the 'least conventional' people.

The logic I think goes off the rails there.

Banners are 'people angry at the system'. Not 'people adamantly supporting the
system'.

Mr. Graham may not realize that those pushing ban culture are in his camp -
'SJW' has more in common with Entrepreneur/CEO and Artist than it does
'Police' or 'Justice System'.

Also the author's choice of words to describe the groups says far more about
the author than his musings on personality types.

Most tellingly 'tattletales' and 'quasi-fascists' as those who support the
rules and 'Galileo' as those who break them.

It also speaks to class a little bit, because for common people, in reality,
the rule breakers are more likely to be actual criminals. Like the 'bad' kind.

The closest 'common science' we can get at would be the 'Big 5' personality
types of which 'conscientiousness' is somewhat correlated with following
rules. Prisons are full of 'unconscientious people'. And most succesfull
people are highly conscientious.

That said, it's not an exact correlation and his 'sheep' type 'vs' aggressive
type are probably very differently: conventional people in the burbs,
aspirational conventional in business. (I literally read that yesterday, I'm
sorry I cannot find the reference, but 'Big 5 conscientiousness' does break
down into sub-types).

The underlying problem with the analysis, is that there is often an inherent
morality in 'convention', which the author's choice of words seems to kind of
deny.

'Look both ways before crossing a street' or 'wear a mask' \- these are _very
important rules_ to follow, and we need these conventions. None of us are
smart enough to really understand the nature of all the rules, so we end up
having to follow a lot of them.

Dr. Fauci says 'wear a mask' \- and since he's the expert, I trust him on the
whole, even though I could point at a myriad issues, I know it's a complicated
thing.

Also:

"The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to
make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake
that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. "

So here's the thing - when CNN is deciding 'who to ban' \- this is very bad.

But when Facebook is deciding how to moderate - this is not bad, and Graham is
wrong to suggest only dummies would want to do this. This is an astonishingly
difficult problem to solve, it's not bounded by the norms we normally
understand, so it should be very attractive to real thinkers.

People say horrible, horrible things _all the time_. Tons of harassment,
abuse, doxing, bullying, point-blank racism - and I'm not talking
'intellectuals being called out' \- I'm talking 'neighbours don't want the
n-word on their street' and 'my boss is a fa __ot ', people making death
threats. Graham is speaking a little bit from the bubble - 'most' of
censorship is simply just getting people to stop saying they're going to kill
each other - not 'banning ideas'.

So I think this thought-piece has a big hole: most people shutting down
freedom of expression (in the free world) in the more intellectual sense - are
not 'conventional' by his own description. Not at all.

------
hristov
This is a good essay and an important one, but I think it completely ignores
one very important aspect of the present social discourse.

It is unfortunate, but some people in the world are politically weak and some
are powerful. The weak are often marginalized and/or treated unfairly in
various ways. Often the only way the weak can gain strength or political power
is through common action. Common action first makes the weak much stronger but
also, if well applied it confronts the strong with a moral choice that they
cannot escape. Thus, often the politically strong join these common actions
simply because it is the right thing to do.

Common action however requires conformism.

It is all fine to be a cool independently minded non-conformist constantly
questioning the rules when you are politically powerful. But when you are
politically repressed that would probably land you in jail and very quickly.
So what is the protection of the politically weak -- to immediately and
collectively protest and threaten to damage society if one of them is unfairly
hurt. This of course requires iron conformism.

It is not always pretty. It is in fact often ugly. For example, I have noticed
that in many countries, the politicians that represent a certain politically
repressed minority are often the most corrupt in the country. They are often
filthy rich while the community they represent is wallowing in poverty. Why?
Because the minority community knows that to split their vote means to be run
over. They know that they have to conform and act as one to protect
themselves. Thus, they overlook the corruption of their leaders in the
interest of common protection. In many minority communities to vote against
the chosen candidate is not a sign of individualism but of treason against
one's family and friends and neighbors. Not showing up at a protest the
community has decided to participate in is treated similarly.

Paul's article is a little vague, so I am not sure exactly what he is talking
about when he is lamenting the rise of conformism in US universities. But it
is quite possible that this rise of conformism is there to protect vulnerable
or politically weak people as much as anything else. University faculty tend
to be politically powerful, but because they have relatively secure jobs they
often have the freedom of conscience and morality (something many people do
not have), and thus they often side with the politically weak.

So, if we want to make our society more safe for non-conformists and
presentation of different ideas, we have to make it more fair. This sounds
counter-intuitive but it is true. A lot of the so called taboo ideas are taboo
because they are connected to a long history of horrible repression and
perhaps even a present state of repression, and there is a very real fear that
expressing such an idea will continue said repression.

So for example, take the idea that a certain minority race is inherently less
intelligent than average. Currently this idea is pretty much taboo. One may
argue that in a society that better tolerates non-conformism such an idea even
if disliked or even if wrong will get a fair hearing, perhaps be researched
etc. But in society where this minority race is politically disadvantaged
merely mentioning this idea will result in further repression. People of that
race will have difficulty getting jobs as they will automatically be assumed
to be stupid. Research will be conducted but at least some of the research
will be culturally biased and carefully tailored to reach predetermined
conclusions. This is not theoretical. It has pretty much happened already
multiple times. See, for example, Jay Coulds excellent book "The Mismeasure of
Man".

But if one suggest an idea that does not carry a history of repression with
it, such as linking intelligence to an astrological sign or to birth-weight
the idea will not be considered taboo and may be fairly researched.

If we can imagine a fair society where someone's race is as inconsequential as
their astrological sign, perhaps there would not be that much race related
taboos. But that is not yet the case.

------
mcguire
Imagine a world where people weren't divided into the "us-es" and the
"them-s". Particularly by someone who is wealthy and powerful. And most
particularly when the "them-s" are clearly intended to be untermensch.

For one thing, I don't know how many people Graham has interacted with over
the years; probably a great deal more than I have given that I'm quite shy as
well as a confirmed misanthrope. However, I do know a fair number of people
and _exactly none_ of them fit neatly into "aggressively/passively
conventional/independent". (For one, I had an uncle that was a staunch Baptist
and had been the sheriff of De Baca county, NM, who conspiratorially confided
that he liked a glass of red wine of an evening.) _Everyone_ is conventional
about somethings and independent about others, and everyone is sometimes
aggressive and sometimes passive about those things.

"[T]he aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales." Yes, of
course they are. I note that "whistle-blower" is a synonym of "tattletale".

"[T]he passively conventional-minded, are the sheep." Yes, naturally, sheep.
([https://xkcd.com/1013/](https://xkcd.com/1013/)) And is it just me or is
really hard to tell the "passively conventional-minded" from the "passively
independent-minded"?

"[T]he passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones." Those kooky cloud-
cuckoo-land dwellers. Just try not to be on the side of the road while they're
driving, 'cause they're probably not paying attention.

"[T]he aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones." Yes, of course.
"Eppur si muove." Or possibly "Give me all of the cash in the drawer or I'll
shoot you in the face." (Remember, there are all kinds of rules.)

"And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students
would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that
the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been
aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not
only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its
staunchest defenders."

Indeed. Remember, "conventional" is bad, "independent" is good, and bad is
conventional while good is independent. There were never, _ever_ , any
independent minded defenders of slavery. (Louis Agassiz
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz))
- well, technically he opposed slavery, because it led to mixing the races;
Nikola Tesla ([https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/remembering-
nikol...](https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/remembering-nikola-tesla-
eugenicist)) - well, ok, a little late for slavery. Let's just say that you
probably shouldn't investigate your heroes too thoroughly.) Anyway, I'm
vaguely surprised Graham never worked "muggle" into this essay. Maybe he used
another word. Normie? Mundane?

"For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-
minded, but aggressively so." Yes. Travis Kalanick. Elizabeth Holmes. Adam
Neumann. Doug Evans. Jeffrey Skilling. Martin Shkreli. Bernard L. Madoff.
Arthur Sackler. All aggressively independent-minded, I assure you. But didn't
Peter Thiel found Palantir?

So what are these "bad ideas" whose discussion he's worried about banning? The
great heros of the Confederacy? President Trump's genius? The moral and
physical weakness of women?

Now, I realize that disagreeing with The Paul Graham goes strongly against the
conventional wisdom here on Hacker News. Naturally, one can only be a rebel if
one wears the right uniform. Perhaps I'm not being independent-minded in the
right way. But here's a prediction for you: "aggressively conventional-minded"
is going to replace "virtue signaling" as the favorite dismissal of ideas that
the independent-minded don't want to consider. And "independent-minded" will
be the new "politically incorrect"; a way to blunt criticism of repugnant
words and actions.

(Did he really say that professors of engineering were independent-minded?
Does he know any? I mean, real engineers, not 27-year-old senior software
engineers. I mean, that's way outside my experience.)

------
jonahbenton
The missing dimension in PG's analysis is power, particularly power imbalance.

PG writes that his "aggressively conventional" category are "responsible for a
disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world" and "have been handed a
tool" via social media with the result that "customs protecting free inquiry
have been weakened."

This is bollocks.

Prior to social media, there have been hierarchies- in terms of people
organization at workplaces and in the political arena, and in terms of
information distribution- that prevented those with power from being subjected
to the inquiries from those without.

The notion of "free inquiry" was limited to those topics that were considered
to be of interest to those in power, which often explicitly excluded topics
around justice and power imbalance.

Populists were those organizers who were able to formulate a message and
leverage those powerless voices into a voice that succeeded in demanding
answers from power.

Now, social media have created platforms where voices from groups/individuals
who otherwise are powerless can amplify their individual voices.

But it also is a platform that enables augmentation of the voices that are
speaking from places of power, perhaps even to a greater degree, because power
has access to automation and the levers of the amplification algorithm.

In the US we are facing an unprecedented (for the US) physically aggressive
and dangerous assertion of federal power, under the leadership of a
cognitively diminished, corrupt, and according to some dimensions of national
interest, traitorous, sociopath. This leadership is also by any measure
failing, to a criminal degree, in its most important role- to act in the
interest of those for whom it was elected to serve- in the pandemic.

To complain that "free inquiry"-say, of the sort that Tom Cotton wished to
engage in- is being limited- because his OpEd in the NYT led to a backlash and
to the OpEd leader resigning- is to completely miss the fundamental power
dynamic.

Cotton spoke in service of the same forces that are engaging in state-
sanctioned violence, while also failing at leadership. When that happened in
other countries, we would call Cotton a propagandist and would see it as the
responsibility of journalists to not engage with his arguments, because of the
violence that accompanies them.

As AOC heroically pointed out- violent acts are not separate and apart from
violent speech. When a party in power engages in violent acts, their violent
speech should be considered one and the same.

To say it out loud is banal but necessary- those without power are dying and
having their lives destroyed by the forces holding the reins of legal,
policing, and military power in the US. For there to be "free inquiry" this
assertion of actual violence on the part of the state must stop.

The "aggressively conventional" group that has completely slipped PG's mind in
his analysis is the state, which is in literal terms aggressively and
violently engaging, both in speech and act. This is fundamentally unacceptable
in a nation under rule of law.

Social media is the only vehicle the weak have to organize and amplify, and,
yes, while there are a few casualties from an intellectual perspective- the
OpEd head at the NYT lost his job- these pale in any moral sense in comparison
to the actual casualties at the hands of those in power.

So- PG, some advice: why don't you give away your wealth, get a job as an uber
driver or an "essential" food delivery worker, and see what you think about
social media and cancel culture then. I'll wait.

More directly- PG has blocked me on twitter, because I dared to criticize some
earlier comments he made there. Forgive me for offending, dear leader. I was
only intending to engage in free inquiry.

------
notsureaboutpg
Ah, conventional minded people are those who insist that those who break the
rules are bad, worthless in society, and should be punished.

Then Mr. Graham goes on to say that the rules of civilized, successful,
wealthy societies are that everyone should be free to debate even the worst of
ideas, and the people who prevent this or disagree with this are bad, never
become entrepreneurs (a laughable thought), are not worth considering, and are
in fact responsible for all bad things in the world (well, they and the
leaders who appeal to them, only those two groups of people!)

It's laughably puerile... I mean how does he think this way? Has he any idea
that one of the most valuable companies in the entire world is from a wealthy,
civilized (in terms of lack of crime and lots of social etiquette only),
successful country which has no concept of free expression (ARAMCO in Saudi
Arabia)?

How do intelligent people end up reducing the world into such obviously untrue
caricatures? How does he think that convention is the enemy of new ideas?
Following convention is also the same thing as learning from the past or
standing on the shoulders of giants. Without regard for convention at some
level, the "geniuses" Mr. Graham praises would have been reinventing the wheel
over and over and over again!

~~~
peteretep
> How do intelligent people end up reducing the world into such obviously
> untrue caricatures?

Hot take: as a function of increasing age

~~~
MH15
Ooh this is one I haven't heard before. Now I'm thinking.

------
peisistratos
Almost all access to the media, access to the Internet and so forth in the US
has been consolidated into the control of six corporations: AT&T/Warner,
Comcast, Disney, Newscorp, Sony, and ViacomCBS. As control of almost all
communication is centralized under the control of entities ultimately
controlled by billionaire heirs, the natural reaction of people will be to
struggle over what communications comes out of these channels.

The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the early
1970s in the US. All the wealth has gone to the heirs and a handful of people
mostly born into the white upper middle class. Channels of communication are
shut down. The monopolies I mentioned shut down Usenet and communication
became centralized by them and companies like Facebook.

Everyone I have heard whining about the end of the Enlightenment recently is
part of this to the manor born type, as well as their bought off stalking
horses in relevant communities.

What is happening is a very natural result of what has been happening for
decades. As anti-trust laws are not enforced, as the Fairness Doctrine goes
away and our media channels consistently advocate oppression of nationalities
alongside a newly militarized police, we don't hear of the monopolization of
communication or proletarianization and impoverishment of the population or
militarization of the police, the end of the Fairness doctrine - we hear the
newly centralized lines of communication can't spew out their propaganda
without complaint.

------
dilandau
In which pg spills a few hundred words humblebragging about his maverick
status.

I think the thing to measure is defiance rather than conformity, by the way.
Much more interesting.

------
dilandau
Was PG always so precious, or have I just aged out of appreciating these
sublimated attempts at bolstering ones sense of self?

------
ohgreatwtf
As a passive independently minded, I can say that we also see natural
fluctuation from epochs of independently minded reason to social conformity
and back. These are good and necessarily healthy cycles because the
independently minded, left unchecked, inevitably will achieve the freedom for
certain individuals within that sector to explore avenues of thought and
action that doom civilization and degrade reason and safety. The
conservatively minded, left unchecked, will inevitably lead to total
stagnation and the destruction of personal freedoms. It's a cycle, and the
truly reasonable people, the truly intelligent, will see through it.

I see your fear, and I understand it is about the rise of radical social
conformity, as I personally think was adequetly heralded by ted krazinski and
george lincoln rockwell, two very independently minded, aggressive, and
destructive individuals. It is scary to witness, and to experience leading
into this wave, but understand all things come to an end.

Conservatism, Feminism, Neoliberalism and the Patriarchy are out. Political
correctness and xenomania are on the way out and will be out of vogue within
10 years. The youngest generation to arrive on the world stage is repulsed ad
nauseum with what they rightfully view as political posturing for virtual life
achievement points by all sides of the now universally static social
instrument, whose only purpose, inside and outside of the statehouse, is to
carry out token activities that defend the ambitions of entrenched opponents;
opponents whose true motives are inerrently selfserving, oblivious to the
ground level truth, and dismissive of the long term consequences of their
missions.

It is nearly the hour for the true star children to take their place. The
first to arrive are even now approaching the zenith of power and influence,
and the waves that have come since are growing in intensity. We are actively
uninvested in the television and the mock battles being carried out behind it.
Our life prospects and probability of reproduction have been seized from us,
to serve the needs of those who profit from stasis. We are drones in a steady
state, wealth maintaining, species killing industrial grade dystopia. It won't
last much longer. The majority of the shifts that will come and precipitate
our total revolution across all points of the spectrum that dismisses every
single piece of the political machine enslaving us will take place within a
decade. They wont be heralded by shifts in thought or reason, because it is
the decline of systemic thinking itself which must necessarily decline for to
coexist unincorporated as equals and as stakeholders in a commonwealth
destiny.

This is not anarchy, in practice it could look like a lot of things. It could,
ideally, wind up vaguely resembling some kind of mutualistic, agrarian society
with vast quantities of independent small communities consisting of large,
interconnected families subsiding on self-sustaining garden estates. These
communities could be organized into democratic representational regions that
are governed by a futuristic constitution which, to prevent the entrenchment
of conventional systemic thinking, requires the government model to be
decentralized and assembling on an as needed basis, with temporary, as opposed
to permenant, and internally selected, as opposed to independently appointed,
individuals nominated to national councils and bodies of state, for the
purpose of making nationwide decisions.

There will be war, even in such an era, over resource conflicts. People will,
out of necessity, die. Pray you are not among them. But do not pray for the
bloodshed to come to an end. Conflict is a necessary part of growth, and
growth is requisite for freedom, and freedom is requisite for independent
inquiry. The boil must be allowed for the world to return to a peaceful and
generously cool condition, otherwise, it will always be in a state of
continual repression.

~~~
ohgreatwtf
I could add so much more to this about the state of affairs which claims the
problems in the present era were seeded almost 300 years ago and that the
supposed freedoms of today enshrined in that hour were not, as it were, a
byproduct of the age of enlightenment, but rather, an insideous plot concocted
by masonic and conventionally minded globalists planning a society that would
protect the issues they cared about and protecting their assets against
outside exploitation. I could say that america needs to die, and in truth,
although most of it will survive, it will go through a rebirth, and become a
new thing, not like the phoenix, but rather like the butterfly, which shares
many pieces of the old but is a design of the new.

~~~
ohgreatwtf
Really we need a forum like ycombinator news but instead it's just peoples
ideas and thoughts and you get to upvote or downvote comments but it's not so
simple as a direct vote, it needs to be engineered in such a way that the age
old adages of "Few consider the logic of another to be as sensible as their
own." and "To the dim-minded, the sunlight must seem absurd" \- in order to
promote original and counter-social norms discussion and content.

For it, an innovative voting system would probably be useful. Forums that have
tried to promote anti-conventional ideas have failed before. Usually grossly
disgusting things make their way to the top of the feed in such cases, and
good, original thoughts, meander in that twilight zone between good and bad,
or get mildly downvoted, but only enough to be pushed below the threshhold-
not enough that the negative point association is itself an expression of
dislike for the content. Essentially, people do not so much hate original
ideas, as simply dislike hearing them.

What makes this tricky is that people will always think their opinions
sensible. For example, lets say you post a not so popular but sensible
opinion. If you instituted a mechanism for people to vote on your content on
the basis of logic, or reason, or any other qualitative mechanism, they would
downvote it on the basis of logic, reason, etc.

Instead, we must attack the fundamental cybernetic arrangement of authority
over opinion.

First, we have an up thumb and a down thumb:

I feel that the content presented is good, and i believe it self-sufficiently
so/ It makes me feel uncomfortable, and I believe the evidence is self-
sufficient.

Secondly, we have an up arrow and a down arrow: I understand what the person
is trying to say/ I don't understand their reasoning.

Casting a vote would require selecting both an arrow and a thumb.

Getting a down thumb and a down arrow results in getting one point for
originality. Getting a up thumb and an up arrow results in getting a point for
popularity. Getting a down thumb and an up arrow results in getting a point
for controversiality. Getting a up thumb and a down arrow results in the post
getting a point for absurdity.

The score of the post is determined as follows:

The ratio of originality to controversiality is used to assign a value up to
100. a 1:0 ratio is a score of 100, and a 0:1 score is a value of 0. This
shall be known as the shittest variable, or SV.

The ratio of popularity to controversiality is used to assign a value up to
100. A 1:0 value is a score of 0, 0:1 score 10, and a 1:1 score is a value of
100. This shall be known as the shiteating variable, or SE.

The ratio of originality to absurdity is used to assign a value up to 100. A
1:0 value is a score of 10, 0:1 score 0, and a 1:1 score is a value of 1. This
shall be known as the shittake variable, or ST.

The ratio of popularity to absurdity is used to assign a value up to 100. A
1:0 and a 0:1 is a score of 0. A 1:1 is a score of 10. This shall be known as
the shit-brigading variable, or SB.

SV x SE x ST X SB determines the true value of the post.

However, a user can choose to set a variable in their user profile which shows
all posts based on popularity alone, and all scores based on popularity alone.

However, if the true value exceeds popularity by more than a factor of 10, the
post will be hidden from their view, and the same would go for any replies.

------
thaumaturgy
Isn't it funny how things like this are never written by the boring types?
It's always those wild, maverick, enlightened types seeking to describe
themselves and, along the way, describe others, but mostly to describe
themselves in flattering terms, with just a light veneer of modesty. (The
self-assessed MBTI INTJs are just _fantastically_ entertaining at this.)

"All great ideas come from us," beams the self-described aggressively-
independent-minded, "and if we aren't allowed to champion horrible ideas, why,
the world just won't be able to get on without us."

There are so many coarse assertions in this argument, without any solid
foundations or evidence or even thoughtful observation. Right from the first
sentence:

> _One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and
> aggressiveness of their conformism._

"Arbitrary" ways. It's spelled "arbitrary". There are a plethora of
categorical little boxes that people can try to fit other people into, and
some of those have value sometimes, but they often also cause people to see
other people as _only_ their boxes. [1]

> _Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system..._

Imagine never having seen /r/PoliticalCompassMemes [2]. As gross as it is,
this kind of quadrant-categorization isn't new.

> _There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far more
> conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So the passively
> conventional-minded are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-
> minded the smallest._

This is a setup for seeking minority status for free-thinkers. The problem
with this is that "free" thought -- or "aggressively independent-minded" in PG
parlance -- has no defined, characteristic ideas, by definition. A simple
thought experiment here is the current political divide in the US. Are Trump
voters the "aggressively independent-minded"? Are Democrats? Progressives?
None of the above? If the definition of "aggressively independent-minded"
contracts to, "me and a few people I like", then it's meaningless. _Everyone_
with a strongly-held political belief in the US right now sees themselves as
belonging to the rebel outgroup.

> _Since one 's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of
> the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown
> up in a quite different society._

This had to be the most astoundingly bad line in the whole essay. It rests
upon a supernatural notion of some sense of "self" that is somehow independent
of time and place; that the powerful formative forces of culture and society,
especially throughout early childhood, would somehow not transform each and
every one of us into utterly different people. There is no more polite way to
say this than that that notion is, as far as I know, entirely unfounded in the
field of human development.

> _Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote..._

Okay, do yourself a favor, and read Joseph Yannielli's really excellent
article, hosted on Princeton's site, on Princeton's role in opposing
abolition: [https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-
abolitio...](https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-abolition)

It's long, and it's historical, and it's forthright, and it's introspective.
It also includes many quotes from educated opponents to abolition that, if you
squint just a little bit, sound suspiciously similar to a lot of the
"unacceptable" ideas that so many people right now are crying that they're no
longer supposed to talk about outside the komfortable konfines of their klans.

Try and keep that Princeton article in mind, full and fresh, and then read
this next part from Graham:

> _For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-
> minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest
> places to be._

Princeton themselves disagrees. At length.

This essay does not add to or resolve today's cultural conflicts in any
amount. When the last thing you have left for an idea is that it's special
because you're special and it's your idea, then it's time to consider the
possibility that other people might have some pretty strong arguments against
it.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA&feature=youtu.be&t=185),
the whole video is good though.

[2]:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Po...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Political_Compass_yLR_wo_text.svg/2000px-
Political_Compass_yLR_wo_text.svg.png), for the fortunately unaware.

~~~
jl2718
One essay written by one graduate on a contentious contemporary issue and the
whole place is evil. The tone of the essay indicates it was a rhetorical
exercise in dissent from a popular opinion. The modern judgement that such a
thing is now abhorrent, is exactly the point.

I think perhaps this criticism suffers from a lack of imagination. People that
cannot understand another person’s ideas are quick to label them evil.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _One essay written by one graduate..._

This "one essay" is part of a larger, official project:
[https://slavery.princeton.edu/about/overview](https://slavery.princeton.edu/about/overview)

The author's bio reads:

> _Joseph Yannielli received his PhD from Yale and was the Perkins
> Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Humanities Council. He is an expert on
> the history of slavery and abolition, with a special focus on America, West
> Africa, and the wider world during the nineteenth century. His other areas
> of interest include political and social movements, missionaries and
> religion, capitalism and globalization, and the United States in the world.
> At present, he is completing a book about the Mendi Mission and the role of
> Africa in the American abolition of slavery. He is the founding manager and
> lead developer of the Princeton & Slavery Project website and several other
> digital history projects._

There are four other individuals involved at an organizational level for this
project, and over 50 other students, advisors, and organizations involved in
creating it.

It is absolutely an official statement from the institution of Princeton
University.

But, please, continue to offhandedly dismiss things you don't like as lacking
imagination and assume that other people simply lack the comprehension to
understand the grand ideas in this essay. It's just such a compelling position
to put yourself into, not having to defend bad ideas at all, because hey, only
stupid people could think they'd be bad.

------
mikhailfranco
I read almost all of the essay assuming that the _conventional-minded people_
meant the woke cultural Marxists. They are the conventional wisdom today. He
should have used the word _conservative:_

[1] _On (The Future Of) Conservatism_

....
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu5T3sWAg0w)

Most young Western people seem to be _conventional_ in the progressive
tradition, because they were indoctrinated at school and university by ex-
hippies from the 1960s, who couldn't actually _do_ anything, so they all
became teachers. Sixty years is more than enough to become the conventional
wisdom.

Marx proposed a keen and mesmerizing analysis of Capitalism, a plausible (but
wrong) diagnosis, then a completely ridiculous and laughably naive solution.
Real class-based Marxism was proved wrong many times over, so the Frankfurt
School and 1960s French philosophers decided to switch the dialectic, from
class-based polarization, to group identity politics and the anti-scientific
relativism of non-truths. _Struggle by any other name would smell as sweet._

America is now in the middle of its Maoist _Cultural Revolution._ Let's see
what happens. The world is watching. Does the Enlightenment survive? It's
certainly up for grabs at this point.

The precedent is not good. China was utterly laid waste for decades by Mao.
Tens of millions died, leaving a legacy of intellectual, historical and
economic impoverishment.

It is hard to imagine anyone more evil than Mao, because his fear-mongering
catastrophes and casual genocides were so routinely inflicted against his own
people, his supportive party colleagues, his family, his (ex)wives, and even
his children:

[2] _Mao: The Unknown Story,_ Jung Chang & Jon Halliday.

[3] _Nine Commentaries on the (Chinese) Communist Party_

....
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLED64004A96BE76FA](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLED64004A96BE76FA)

[4] _Evolution Of Evil: Mao Zedong_

....
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxaWmqgmJxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxaWmqgmJxs)

Let us see what happens in America ...

------
agarv
Not meant to be snarky, but PG seems to have rediscovered the big five
personality traits
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)
specifically agreeableness and openness. For people that want to learn more,
Jordan Peterson has a great video lecture series about it
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71I...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71Ihe34eKN6XhCi)

------
Tiktaalik
Abundantly clear from his Twitter that like so many others that are used to
having an unassailable platform of privilege to express themselves, PG has
recognized that normal people now have a voice to push back and criticize
opinions he has, and so he's joined those expressing "concern" about this.

Instead of expressing in concrete terms his views to make them available for
criticism, he talks about the dangers of "cancel culture" instead, presumably
because he knows his views are now beyond community norms and they'd get him
cancelled.

This essay is a scaffolding effort to rebrand people that would seek to
express intolerant opinions as "independent minded" and "free inqueryiers" so
that they can escape criticism.

Nah sorry not gonna work.

~~~
pdonis
_> an unassailable platform of privilege to express themselves_

Anyone can start a website and post essays on it. If many more people read
PG's essays than other people's, that's because he has done things that
attract a wider audience.

------
aerosmile
The amount of negativity in the comments is astonishing (and has been with
regards to all of his recent essays). Which is perverse on a couple of levels:

1\. PG's essay outlines a theory that the majority of the world is
conventionally-minded and doesn't like to discuss new ideas. The comments here
perfectly resemble that theory. PG wins. (Edit: at the time of writing, the
comments were exclusively negative. This has changed since.)

2\. If you don't like his writing and his world view (the brave startup
founder is the hero), then why come to HN? Why support someone's website and
accelerator/fund if you think they are so wrong?

3\. While recognizing the limitations of this framework (see below), let's
recognize that PG became very wealthy by employing the brave founder thesis.
There's got to be a lot of truth there.

If there's anything wrong with PG's writing, it's that he doesn't spell out
the truth for you - which is that in 99% of the cases, you're not the target
audience. This essay is the perfect example. The quadrant he's romanticizing
about is the smallest one, and of course most people are not going to see
themselves resembling those characteristics. Many other essays have this
quality - it's easy to walk away realizing that you're either not young
enough, or not hard-working enough, or not smart enough, or not in a position
to take the required risks to be the target audience. And that hurts, because
it's true. Just don't shoot the messenger.

For clarification, all you get from being a part of PG's target audience is
having a certain set of traits which are good for one thing, but would also
disqualify you from being an astronaut and pursuing many other desirable
careers.

~~~
notsureaboutpg
The most economically successful company in the world is Saudi ARAMCO so what
does that say about PG's startup founder thesis?

~~~
sanxiyn
It proves divine right of kings in general, and House of Saud in particular.
Sounds right to me.

