The Four Quadrants of Conformism

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

" 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. "

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

Are there some examples of what this might refer to?

> "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.

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' :)

  "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."

  "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."

http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit...

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.

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")

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.)

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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

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.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam

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

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

Which is it?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Rules are for fools.

- 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.

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.

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.