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Comment by dpweb | Hacker News Reader

I like how Emerson felt about conformity, not to mention - to be exceptional, one must be a non-conformist. Many would rather be accepted than exceptional At some point in your life, you may have to make that choice.

The problem with public opinion in our times is this idea that the crowd is always right. Something is true because the crowd says it is. The crowd saying it is, makes it true. Sane is not the same as true. Sane just means many people believe it. The person who believes something no one else does is considered insane. When the lone "insane" person is vindicated, great wealth and success seem to follow.

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> Many would rather be accepted than exceptional. At some point in your life, you may have to make that choice.

I think that there are two problems with this. (EDIT: 'Problems' is a bad word. I don't mean two things that make it wrong, but rather two things that require a careful reading to appreciate fully. I should have said 'subtleties'.)

First, and most importantly, I think that people think that being exceptional is a choice. Thus, someone says "ah, I shall be exceptional!", and sits back and waits to become so. Being exceptional is not a choice; becoming exceptional is, though it is a slow process, subject to setbacks, and not guaranteed of even eventual success (unless—as is perhaps uniquely appropriate here—one is willing to move the goalposts when necessary, and find success where one is).

Second, I take your explicit point to be the decision between being accepted and being exceptional, but I'll respond as if it were between being conformist and being exceptional (which I took to be the subtext). After the problem is surmounted of deciding just to be exceptional, and realising that one must become so, I think that sometimes people confuse blind non-conformity with reasoned non-conformity. That is, a decision not to conform just in order not to be part of the crowd is just as silly as a decision to conform to be part of the crowd. Rather, make your decisions as you will, regardless of the pressure of the crowds, with the idea that you will sometimes agree with and (probably) more often disagree with them, and become exceptional in that way.

In deciding to be exceptional, I'm thinking of the courageous act of separating yourself from the crowd when it's safer to conform, when faced with a binary decision between the two. That decision can have lifelong consequences. A friend who could have been an olympic swimmer - but it was easier to not put in the effort, get a job at the local health food store, and get married. Or the brilliant kid with enormous potential, growing up in the bad neighborhood, who purposely fails at school to not get bullied.

I would separate the non-conformist whose conscience puts them at odds with a misguided but widespread popular opinion, from the contrarian. Being contrarian just for the sake of it can be silly sometimes. Although I still like those who consider that so much of their identity that they take contrarian positions even when unnecessary. If anything they are a non-yielding role model and we could use some of that, cause the scales are definately tipped in favor of conformity. It's drilled into us from a very young age.

> In deciding to be exceptional, I'm thinking of the courageous act of separating yourself from the crowd when it's safer to conform, when faced with a binary decision between the two.

I still think that this decision is one concerning becoming, rather than being, exceptional. That is, I think of being exceptional as the accumulated result of good decisions, rather than as a single (even lifelong) decision in its own right.

> I would separate the non-conformist whose conscience puts them at odds with a misguided but widespread popular opinion, from the contrarian.

Oh, I see; I was reading 'non-conformist' as essentially synonymous with 'contrarian'. Your clarifying the distinction addresses my second point.

> Although I still like those who consider that so much of their identity that they take contrarian positions even when unnecessary. If anything they are a non-yielding role model and we could use some of that, cause the scales are definately tipped in favor of conformity.

As a reflexive contrarian (I am so inclined to test positions by argument that, if it happens that I convince my interlocutor, then I sometimes unthinkingly argue against his or her new position, which I had been urging, and in favour of the original position), I am not sure that there is as much value to such a position as you suggest; but that is a minor point, and besides I could easily be wrong.

The technologist, specifically the software developer (ie.. the typical HN reader) seems to often be a non-conformist, even contrarian. Why do you think that is? Cause we think we're smarter than everyone else, is my theory!

> The technologist, specifically the software developer (ie.. the typical HN reader) seems to often be a non-conformist, even contrarian. Why do you think that is?

I'm a mathematician, not a software developer, but I think that both professions train their practitioners to believe that the way to get good tools (or theorems) is to try to break them, and to keep only those that survive—a 'confrontational' approach that it is (perhaps too) easy to carry over into the rest of life. I won't deny that there is probably some arrogance in my contrarianism, too.

Often not immediately agreeing with a mainstream opinion, or stopping by to evaluate pros and cons, is seen as being contrarian or signaling smarts.

It's funny that when people ask what use in their lives will learning math and science have, we answer that it's about the clarity and discipline in thinking that will make them smarter - and then we turn around and refuse to believe that people whose training is in applying math and science to life can actually be smarter.

>When the lone "insane" person is vindicated, great wealth and success seem to follow.

I must not have been paying attention. When did that ever happen?

When someone sees a market inefficiency that everyone else was ignoring, and then solves it, they are in position to collect economic rents until others catch up. The problem that was solved was not imaginary, it was real, and people are suddenly able to pay to remove this problem. This is clear throughout history as first movers have successfully implemented local monopolies with varying degrees of scale.

> When someone sees a market inefficiency that everyone else was ignoring, and then solves it, they are in position to collect economic rents until others catch up.

PG, for example: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html . :-)

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