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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else go crazy in the presence of groupthink?

I've never been unpopular and I'm the kind of guy to make friends with individuals in various groups, but I've always been allergic to cliques.

Whenever I find myself part of an in-group that's rapidly converging on groupthink, I get deeply uncomfortable and don't last long there. When I'm on the periphery of a rapidly coalescing clique, I often find myself becoming the outspoken outsider.

I just can't stand people agreeing on everything -- I've got to play the contrarian. Universal agreement just doesn't seem safe or comfortable.

I feel I have a natural resistance to groupthink and it's a huge liability. Most people seem to love forming into tribes.

And frankly, how do you stop the ever-present march of groupthink? I guess key is creating a culture where respectful disagreement is encouraged and expected, where people can openly admit to being wrong without losing face.

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I understand the feeling - I often feel like the world is insane and you are the crazy one for pointing out that something makes no sense and dismissed without even a half-assed hypothesis backing it. Finding out there is a good counterintuitive reason for apparent irrationality is a relief.

I suspect the easiest fix on a personal level is ironically self-selection but certain things are known to exacerbate groupthink like the sense of a threat - annoyingly completely separate from /actual/ threats.

What drives me over the edge though is that developers believe they are so imminently intelligent. Don't get me wrong, many of them are.

But sometimes they believe so strongly in their own biases and preconceptions that it is deeply frustrating.

For instance, there are some who believe in the gospel of whiteboard interviews and when you try to discuss things like individual variation and how the process could be mostly random, their minds are completely closed.

Honestly, I don't encounter these sorts of problems nearly as often with people who have had liberal arts educations... but then again, I don't debate those sorts of people online like I do with programmers. Maybe it's just people are more confident in arguing their opinions when they're anonymous.

There are two types of intelligence: fluid intelligence (specialized domains of knowledge) and crystallized intelligence (general knowledge). Those developers you encountered were probably very good at what they do (fluid intelligence), but crystallized intelligence is just another separate category that operates based on a different set of thinking patterns.

To be frank I have encountered the problem /more/ with Liberal Arts Educations who gain a misplaced confidence im absolute nonsense and treat using numbers to decide anything with contempt as less human. I suspect that it may be more the culture to blame at that point per se.

Stereotyping and the tendency of labelling are often the enemies to establishing a culture like the one you described. It's a product of our egos and cultural history unfortunately, and we are all susceptible to this flaw from time to time.

I can't tell if we are getting better or worse on that front. The attention economy and social media might have accidentally turned people into various giant bubbles, making it increasingly more difficult to find common patterns to agree on. Everyone all has different opinions on thousands of tiny different things. People in the past did not face this problem, the society of yesterday was a much more simple place with fewer variables, so groupthink was probably a lot more common.

Diversity is the obvious answer to counter groupthink, but managing diversity effectively is in itself another challenge. This is a modern problem of today and will become even bigger tomorrow.

Other than alignment, a safe environment for everyone to operate in as you have suggested is absolutely fundamental. Human will always have the tendency to attach labels to everything, it's the natural way for our brain to create patterns and make sense of the world around us. Without those patterns, we can't operate effectively either.

In that sense, the only way to counter that is to anonymize informational sources during internal meetings and data collection processes so people can't attach labels and link it to specific sources - people don't like to admit it but we all do this unconsciously. That way the data will be free from prejudices and biases since all sources are being given equal weight in consideration.

Organizations should run pilot programs to test this on their decision-making process. It should be easy to achieve with many tools available today.

Applying the "grey zone" mental model is also important here, as it constantly forces us to consider the pros and cons and weight everything in probability calculation - there is not a clearly right or wrong position in many cases.

Another method is by encouraging each group member to seek out two to three other directly or secondary related topics by themselves (so there is a higher chance for a more random selection which should yield better accuracy), and then asking each person to make a summary on the areas they had chosen, and to further explain their idea on why they have established those critical connections with the main topic. This way, it may foster the discovery of new patterns based on arbitrary links that no other individuals had ever thought of before.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this probably makes you part of a group. There are probably people who will comment agreeing with you is what I'm trying to say.

We're all, kind of, members of the People's Front of Judea. (Except, of course, for those of us who are members of the Judean People's Front.)

I commented on this before. Basically, most of us are rebellious in almost exactly the same manner as every other "rebellious" person. Same taglines. Same clothes. Same beliefs. Same pass times. Etc etc etc. We've all become the brooding teenager, who believes him or herself to be unique and counter cultural. Yet somehow that teen still looks, sounds and dresses like every other unique and counter cultural teenager on the planet.

As humans, we haven't really come up with a way to escape groupthink. That fact has got me wondering if groupthink is simply a facet not so much of human behavioral psychology, but rather a facet almost of evolutionary behavior? Something we can't tear ourselves away from, because it's literally who we are? We basically only choose which group we are part of, whether or not we're aware of it.

Your comment reminded me of one my favorite posters:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0535/6917/products/individ...

That's a false dichotomy, though. You can be part of a group and not succumb to toxic groupthink.

In many ways, groupthink can be enormously useful. In a sense, universities, books, and other knowledge dissemenation mediums exist to solidify useful groupthink. Maybe one guy comes up with some small piece of math, another guy on the other side of the world comes up with another piece, and everyone makes their various contributions until someone comes along and rolls it together into theory that advances the world.

People who don't think like the group are reformed or weeded out so everyone understands how to "properly" study the world and you don't end up with a bunch of cranks coming up with intellectually lazy speculations.

So that's good groupthink (but people don't call it groupthink, because groupthink is generally considered to be the negative version of that). The problem is when groupthink becomes detached from reality.

But back to your original point: no, if I'm part of a larger group and I start to disagree with them because I think they are wrong, that does not make me part of a group. It's just me. I could organize a group of dissenters and form a critical mass to change the group, but that's not typically what I do.

Furthermore, the argument that "everyone is unique like you" to criticize counter-cultural movements is attacking a strawman. Maybe unintelligent teenagers think they're radically unique. But counter-cultural movements are very much groups. Humans work best in groups. We think best in groups. No one can accomplish very much alone.

All the thoughts I have, and all the thoughts you have, are plucked from the ether of the prevailing beliefs of our times. I can explain to you my personal philosophy, and you could sit down and trace my intellectual lineage if you really wanted to. You could observe how I picked the belief I'm arguing for after reading Carl Sagan at 16. He got it reading some other guy who got it from Schopenhauer or something. Maybe some of my Baptist upbringing is sprinkled in too, which comes from the Bible, in a line of intellectual descent that can be traced back to Zoroastrianism and beyond.

In the meantime, there are a thousand other youngish programmer dudes who read the same books that I did, and we talk to each other on the internet and reach group consensus. We bounce ideas off of each other and bring each other in line -- just as we're doing to each other at this very moment, on this very forum.

People who think they're radically unique are wrong. We're social animals. But that doesn't mean having the courage to dissent isn't important.

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